Water works | 3 May 2012

My colleague Lloyd Evans had much fun a couple of weeks ago playing the curmudgeon with the Cultural Olympiad. Alas poor Bard, he quipped, ‘press-ganged’ into the World Shakespeare Festival. And it sounds as though Lloyd will be running for his life, especially from the Bankside-based Globe to Globe project in which all 37 plays will be given in the same number of languages.

It is left to the RSC to fly the flag for Shakespeare in his native tongue with a dozen new productions. Risky, you would have thought, to launch its initial contribution of The Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night and The Tempest as ‘Shakespeare’s Shipwreck Trilogy’. And indeed two ‘activists’, possibly inspired by the Boat Race swimmer, did their best to sink it by clambering on to the stage at the start of Twelfth Night and intoning a ditty that included the words ‘Deep Water despair’. As directors tend to begin with attention-grabbing inventions, I began to think it was the start of the play until an usher arrived to expose the intervention as a protest against BP’s support for the RSC.

‘What country, friends, is this?’ spluttered Viola, surfacing from an immense tank at stage front on to the huge planked raft on which all three plays are performed, and the action could begin. There’d been a less pleasant watery start for Comedy of Errors when a bearded man had been dunked to within an inch of his life in an aquarium set up on a truck.

The torturing of Egeon is but the first of the trials by water and by much else besides in the course of the three ‘modern dress’ productions. A gantry stretches diagonally over the stage, allowing the winching in to the Ephesus quayside of a crate from which spring the Antipholus of Syracuse and his Dromio as illegal immigrants.