Do you ever think about how plastic hadn’t been invented yet in the 16th century, so they used actual human skulls in early productions of Hamlet? Because I think about that a lot.
Afghan women prepare backstage to perform Shakespeare in Kabul for the first time since 1979.
Some people have been reblogging asking about the production, and I recognised the costumes, so here’s what I know! It’s a production of Love’s Labour’s Lost, in 2005, by the group Roy-e-Sabs. The play was translated both into Dari and into an Afghan context (source):
“The play’s setting was changed from Shakespeare’s French Navarre to Afghanistan, with Navarre now the King of Kabul, and the ladies visiting, not from the French court, but from Herat, a city with a long artistic heritage. When Jaber’s production toured the country beyond Kabul in the summer of 2006 and performed in Herat, the King was now from Herat, the ladies from Kabul; the play was also performed in Mazar-e-Sharif. The play’s comic “masque of Muscovites” also had to be transformed—given the still-fresh and painful memories of the Soviet invasion and occupation—to a masque of Indians, with other Bollywood elements added in, such as weaving slapstick Bollywood songs into the play.“
There’s a book about it, called Shakespeare in Kabul, and the same company also did the Comedy of Errors at the Globe to Globe festival in 2012, which I saw and was hilarious. Like Love’s Labours, it translated the play to Afghanistan, setting it in Kabul instead of Ephesus, with the ‘Syracuse’ twins instead from buzzy artistic Samarkand. It used the play to satirise strict sharia law, especially the double standards it puts on women in public.
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