Adelaide Festival has unveiled an unlikely coup: five hours of Shakespeare in Dutch that was lapped up in London and NYC.
The question was not the most polite way to begin an interview but as a lover of Shakespearean language I had to ask. ‘Why would an English-speaker want to sit through five-and-a-half hours of Shakespeare in Dutch?’
By the end of his response, Ivo van Hove had me ready to book my tickets to the 2014 Adelaide Festival, where his Roman Tragedies has just been announced as the flagship event. It helped that that the work has played to great success for seven years in New York, Montreal, Barcelona and London, the latter a place where it after all had to compete with the reconstruction of Shakespeare’s Globe on the banks of the Thames.
