Craiova International Shakespeare Festival

The biennial Craiova International Shakespeare Festival has now been the largest Shakespeare festival in the world for some years, so its largest ever iteration, in May 2026, was presumably the largest Shakespeare festival ever staged. The Festival now comes complete with art exhibitions (this year, including a set of posters designed and produced by the University of Birmingham's Shakespeare Institute about the history of Shakespearean theatre), digital installations, productions for pre-school children and a late-evening rock festival staged at a temporary replica Tudor village south of the city centre. Approximately 500 performances and events took place over 10 days, and though only two Shakespeare Institute faculty were there – Dr Jessica Chiba and Professor Michael Dobson – they were involved in a substantial proportion of them.  Both participated in the daily European Shakespeare Research Association performance studies seminar, the main academic element of the festival, instigated by Professor Dobson and European colleagues in 2010; and both conducted on-stage post-show interviews with cast members and creatives from some of the dazzling array of Shakespearean productions and adaptations from around the world seen at the festival – including Cheek by Jowl, Kakushinhan, and Kaimaku Pennant Race.

Professor Dobson also spoke on a panel about Shakespeare and AI with the festival’a artistic director Vlad Dragulescu and the Romanian theatrical visionary Octavian Saiu. By way of preface to Gregory Doran’s puppet production (first seen in Stratford in 2004), Professor Dobson gave a lecture about Venus and Adonis, and he later interviewed Mr Doran, before, on stage in between the afternoon and evening performances, presenting him with the 2026 Craiova International Shakespeare Festival Prize.

International festivals are now a major part of Shakespeare’s presence in world theatre: they feature on the syllabus of the Shakespeare Institute’s module on performance history. One of the most striking shows in Craiova this year, meanwhile, was Tamara Trunova’s HA*L*T, a vivid and haunting play about the experience of life in wartime Ukraine centred around the unstaged production of Hamlet which the company were due to premier in Kyiv when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. This is a play already known to those Institute students who have taken the ‘Shakespeare’s Worlds/The World’s Shakespeares’ course devised by Dr Chris Laoutaris and Professor Dobson, which concludes with a week on Shakespeare’s rich performance history in Ukraine and features a surtitled videorecording of HA*L*T, among other productions.