In 2012, during the London Olympics, the Globe theatre invited foreign theatre companies to perform every one of Shakespeare’s 37 plays in different languages. The Henry VI trilogy, a meditation on the horrors of civil war, was presented by actors from Serbia, Albania and Macedonia; a company from Ramallah staged Richard II, “Shakespeare’s masterpiece of dislocation,” in the words of the official programme; actors from Kabul played The Comedy of Errors, “a genuinely audacious stand against the strictures of life in Afghanistan.” The plays were a box-office success; more than 100,000 people attended the performances, many of them newcomers to the theatre. A year later, the Globe decided to mark the four-hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth – which takes place next month – with another ambitious undertaking: a world tour of Hamlet, in which the Globe’s production would visit each one of the world’s 205 nation states.
One of the stops on the Hamlet world tour is the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, a state the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights recently advised the Security Council to refer to the International Criminal court for “systematic, widespread and gross human rights violations.” With unusual candour the Commissioner observes that “the gravity, scale and nature of these violations reveal a state that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world.” The report estimates that during the last few decades hundreds of thousands of citizens deemed guilty of political crimes have disappeared into North Korea’s prison camps. There “the inmate population has been gradually eliminated through deliberate starvation, forced labor, executions, torture, rape and the denial of reproductive rights enforced through punishment, forced abortion and infanticide.”
Eyewitness testimony indicates that torture “is an established feature of the interrogation process” in North Korea “especially in cases involving political crimes.” The state has also reportedly used manmade famines as a means of punishing dissent: “decisions, actions and omissions by the state and its leadership caused the death of at least hundreds of thousands of people and inflicted permanent physical and psychological injuries on those who survived.” In a sentence that might have appeared in a review of George Orwell’s 1984, the report says the DPRK “operates an all-encompassing indoctrination machine that takes root from childhood to propagate an official personality cult and to manufacture absolute obedience to the supreme leader (Suryong), effectively to the exclusion of any thought independent of official ideology and state propaganda.”
When Amnesty International objected to the inclusion of North Korea on the Globe’s itinerary, the theatre replied that it wished to share its version of a play that “instigates discussion and dialogue” with audiences “in as diverse a range of locations as possible.” This response is worthy of serious consideration. The Polish scholar Jan Kott, who popularized the idea of Shakespeare as “our contemporary,” believed that “when we use this interesting little cliché … [w]e mean that Shakespeare has become a contemporary to our changing times and that these times have affected our perception of Shakespeare. Kott didn’t reach his conclusions lightly. As a member of the underground resistance to the German occupation of Poland and a former Communist, he knew firsthand “the way in which the history is part of the drama and the drama is part of the history.” Kott had watched many Shakespeare productions in which the time inhabited by the actors resonated deeply with the contemporary lives of the audience. During the Cold War, for example, a line like “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark” – could strike an audience behind the Iron Curtain with great moral force, although it would barely raise an eyebrow with their English or American counterparts.
There is already a compelling account of what Shakespeare can mean in North Korea. While comparing George Orwell and Aldous Huxley the British essayist Theodore Dalrymple observes that for both writers “one man symbolised resistance to the dehumanising disconnection of man from his past: Shakespeare” Dalrymple then recalls being approached by a young student as he stood in front of “the enormous and almost deserted square in front of the Great People’s Study House” in Pyongyang. The student quietly asks whether Dalrymple speaks English – an “electric moment: for in North Korea, unsupervised contact between a Korean and a foreigner is utterly unthinkable, as unthinkable as shouting, ‘Down with Big Brother!’” Learning that he does, the student tells Dalrymple that “reading Dickens and Shakespeare is the greatest, the only pleasure of my life.” Reflecting on this “searing communication” Dalrymple realizes that “For him, Dickens and Shakespeare (which the regime permitted him to read with quite other ends in view) guaranteed the possibility not just of freedom but of truly human life itself.”
The political manoeuvring that will determine North Korea’s future will make little immediate difference to the millions of people who endure its daily horrors today. China’s reluctance to intervene in the DPRK all but guarantees this. Faced with the international community’s appalling inaction on North Korea, however, the Globe theatre’s decision to proceed with its production of Hamlet is a small but important victory. If nothing else, it ensures that for a brief moment, an audience in the world’s most repressive state will have unfettered access to one of Shakespeare’s most unsettling and profound works of art, and perhaps even recognize him as their contemporary.
