All the world's his stage

Shakespeare's plays are among the few narratives that traverse national and religious lines and have enduring global appeal, writes Fintan O'Toole

On Robben Island, where the South African apartheid regime held its most dangerous opponents, one prisoner, Sonny Venkatrathnam, kept a secret copy of Shakespeare's plays under a cover disguised with Indian religious pictures.

The copy was passed around and each prisoner signed his name next to his favourite lines. As Anthony Sampson notes in his biography of Nelson Mandela: "Ahmed Kathrada chose Henry V's 'Once more into the breach'. Wilton Mkwayi chose Malvolio's 'Some are born great' from Twelfth Night. Govan Mbeki chose the opening lines of the same play: 'If music be the food of love'. Billy Nair chose Caliban's lines from The Tempest: 'This island's mine, by Sycorax my mother'. Walter Sisulu chose Shylock's 'Still have I borne it with a patient shrug,/ For suff'rance is the badge of all our tribe.' "

Mandela favoured the lines from Measure for Measure he recited to himself as he was waiting for the final verdict after his treason trial, and was preparing for a death sentence: "Be absolute for death; either death or life shall thereby be the sweeter."

The prisoners, as Anders Hallengren has written, were a diverse lot: "Only a few of them were Christian believers; a few were Muslims or Hindus, a few communists and their origins were different. They all knew Shakespeare, however."

For those who think of Shakespeare as the preserve of white, middle-class western culture, the Robben Island experience should be a reminder of the astonishing universality of a playwright and poet who died almost 400 years ago having, in all likelihood, never left England.

If Ireland is currently in the grip of Shakespeare fever, with two Macbeths currently in production, Romeo and Juliet opening tonight at the Abbey and Rough Magic's Taming of the Shrew on tour, we are only catching up with the rest of the world.

The continuing global appeal of Shakespeare is not, admittedly, always rooted in contexts as noble as that of Robben Island. His plays get produced for as many bad reasons as good ones: because they're on an examination course; because directors can use them to show off; because there are no good new plays to be done; or because (especially in the US) some movie or TV star wants to prove his or her credentials as an actor.

But none of this would matter greatly if audiences didn't want to see them. The main reason the plays are done again and again is that they still have the capacity to connect.

It is tempting to believe that the core of that connection is language. The beauty, richness, virtuosity and energy of Shakespeare's poetry don't just adorn the English language, but have helped to shape it. His works are a vast linguistic safari park where colonies of exotic words, phrases and sentences cavort and breed, remaining robustly alive but maintaining a distance from ordinary life.

But while language is at the core of Shakespeare's achievement, it is, oddly enough, almost irrelevant to his continuing cultural potency. For one thing, the 300 or so Shakespeare films (there are more than 60 of Hamlet alone) that are now part of the Shakespeare canon generally reduce the play texts to mere skeletons. For another, Shakespeare has long since transcended the English language.

This is indeed the paradox of contemporary "Bardolatry". The more the plays have been stripped of what used to be regarded as their essence - the poetry - the more potent and "modern" they have become.

IT IS TRANSLATION that made Shakespeare more than an English icon, but translators have not merely created their own, inevitably different, versions of Shakespeare's texts. They have also drastically altered the form of his plays. The French, for example, couldn't bear the freeflowing forms of the originals and tried to make them into classical French dramas. They also turned Elizabethan English into 19th-century heroic French.

It is interesting, for example, to read Alexandre Dumas's version of Hamlet, the most popular in France for a long time, translated back into English by Frank Morlock. Here's Hamlet in the original: "Oh, that this too solid flesh would melt,/ Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew,/ Or that the Everlasting had not fixed His canon 'gainst self-slaughter!/ O God! O God!/ How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable/ Seem to me all the uses of this world!"

And here is Dumas's version: "Alas if this corrupt flesh would dissolve in vapour and explode, or if an accord would be reached between suicide and God's thunder! Lord! Lord! Lord! How heavy it is, infertile - and how disgusting the work of this world! Fie on life! Oh fie!"

Yet, even through this thick gauze of romantic emoting, Shakespeare managed to insert himself so deeply into French culture as to become an essential part of it. It was through his reputation in France, moreover, that Shakespeare became the universal bard. It was from France, not from England, that Germany, Italy, central Europe and Russia caught the Shakespeare bug.

Likewise, Shakespeare's popularity in Japan, which began in the second half of the 19th century, involved not merely a monumental effort of translation, but also a constant negotiation between his forms and the native traditions of Noh and Kabuki.

Not merely the entire shape and rhythm of the verse, but the entire feel of the dramatic action had to be radically altered. Yet Japanese versions of Shakespeare - particularly Akira Kurosawa's films and Yukio Ninegawa's stage productions - have been, for the last 30 years, central to contemporary approaches to the plays.

Shakespeare is, indeed, the lingua franca of modern theatre and this is part of his continuing appeal. While in England (and to some extent in Ireland) the plays represent a notion of tradition, in most of the rest of the world they arrived on a wave of global modernity.

In continental Europe, they connected with the Romantic assault on classical strictures and their big, pyrotechnical protagonists allowed star actors to embody the rise of individualism. In British colonies, they represented a part of the colonising culture that acknowledged its brutality and violence, as well as its richness and complexity. In Japan, they allowed an engagement with the exotic West that could be construed in local terms. In these very different contexts, Shakespeare came to be about both the distant past and, in a sense, the imagined future, and it is this paradoxical combination that has created the sense of universality.

That global reach is now expressed in almost any good production in Ireland or Britain. Most directors are influenced, consciously or unconsciously, by a deep history of other productions in a wide range of countries. They draw, not just on an English tradition of production, from William Poel and Harley Granville Barker to Peter Brook and Deborah Warner, but on Max Reinhardt's and Leopold Jessner's work in Germany, Konstantin Stanislavsky's in Russia, Roger Planchon's and Ariane Mnouchkine's in France, Ingmar Bergman's in Sweden, Ninegawa's in Japan and so on.

With Shakespeare, as with no other playwright, directors, designers and performers can plug straight in to an international theatrical dynamic.

IF THIS IS one of the reasons for Shakespeare's continuing prominence, the other is much simpler. It is the stories he tells. In all the huge transformations of language, culture, conventions of performance and political context that the plays undergo, it is the plots that remain broadly stable.

They do so for the very odd reason that they remain equally inexplicable everywhere. There is a scale, a speed, a complexity to the stories, but also a mystery. For all their vivid immediacy, they remain essentially unfathomable in their interplay of cause and effect, intention and consequence. We never really understand, for example, what happens in Macbeth, how much the witches drive the action and how much they merely reflect Macbeth's fears and desires, how Lady Macbeth's mind collapses, how Macbeth's power ebbs away. It is such mysteries that keep the stories alive. Since we never fully comprehend them, we can never quite leave them alone.

Because the stories retain this life across a range of cultures, they have come to play a unique function in contemporary global culture. On Robben Island, they acted as a shared imaginative possession of Christians, Hindus, Muslims and atheists.

Likewise, in a globalised culture in which old myths have either been discarded or become sources of division, Shakespeare's plays are one of the few sets of narratives that are available across national and religious lines. They are the myths of the 21st-century world and to go to see them is to take part in a ritual that connects us both to the past and to an evolving global future.

Romeo and Juliet opens at the Abbey tonight and runs until Mar 22; Second Age Theatre Company's production of Macbeth is at the Helix, Dublin from Feb 19 until Mar 14; Rough Magic's The Taming of the Shrew is at Glór, Ennis, from tomorrow to Feb 16, Dunamaise Arts Centre, Portlaoise, from Feb 18 to Feb 20, and Siamsa Tíre, Tralee, from Feb 22 to 24. Siren Productions' Macbeth will run from Mar 4 to 15 at the Empty Space, Wood Quay, Temple Bar, Dublin