Shakespeare’s Hamlet in Samoa

Members of the local community were mightily impressed with Hamlet staged at the National University of Samoa on Friday night.

The play, which opened at Shakespeare’s Globe on 23 April 2014, marks the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth. To celebrate the milestone, Hamlet is touring every single country on earth over two years.

This week, Samoa is hosting 16 extraordinary men and women travelling across the seven continents, performing in a huge range of unique and atmospheric venues.

“Globe to Globe Hamlet was created with the aim of performing Hamlet to as many people as possible, in as diverse a range of places as possible,” Dominic Dromgoole, Artistic Director of Shakespeare’s Globe and Director of Hamlet said, on a press release.

“The central principle of the tour is that Shakespeare can entertain and speak to anyone, no matter where they are on earth; and that no country or people are not better off for the lively presence of Hamlet.”

So far, Globe to Globe Hamlet has been performed in over 100 countries across the Americas, Europe and Africa to more than 89,000 people, with over half of the whole tour now complete. January 2015 saw Hamlet travel to East Africa, with the first African performance of the tour at Algeria’s National Theatre.

Other January highlights included the incredible Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt, the beautiful St Louis Cathedral in Carthage, Tunisia, and Ethiopia’s National Theatre in Addis Ababa. A free outdoor performance in Sudan drew an audience of over 3000 people.

On 29th January, the Hamlet company became the first foreign theatre company to perform a full play in Somaliland for 23 years.

February 2015 has seen Hamlet continue its journey around East Africa, with performances outdoors in the gardens of the University of Rwanda, and in Burundi, Kenya and Uganda.

In 2014, Hamlet was performed to audiences at The Globe, in Wittenberg, in Tromsø within the Arctic Circle, in Moscow, through the Baltics, in Kiev on the eve of their elections to an audience including Vladimir Klitschko and Pietro Poroshenko, at the United Nations in New York, at the oldest theatre in Central America, the majestic Teatro Nacional de El Salvador, outside on the banks of the St Lawrence River in Canada, in the shadow of Mexico’s Yucatán Cathedral, built a year before Hamlet was written, at a beautiful marina in Antigua & Barbuda, on a mountainside in Guatemala, in St Kitts and Nevis, where the Hamlet company became the first international theatre group to perform on the island, in Poland, where the company was invited to open the Gdansk Shakespeare Theatre, outdoors for free in Chilean parks, in Argentina, which marked the 100th show, and across majestic national theatres throughout South America. In October 2014 UNESCO patronage was granted to Globe to Globe Hamlet, in recognition of the tour’s engagement with local communities and promotion of cultural education.