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.