This wasn’t just a performance of a Shakespeare classic. This was a performance in Palestinian Arabic, brought to the UK as part of the World Shakespeare Festival, in the Globe to Globe season of all Shakespeare plays each in a different language, being hosted by Oxfam UK as part of their 70th anniversary celebrations. But despite the fancy packaging this was an elegantly simple production and a reminder that all you need is a great story and a space to tell it.

Richard II, as envisioned by Shakespeare 200 years after the actual historical events, is a vain man who uses his position as monarch to fund his personal habits and quests for glory. On the throne through accident of birth he is surrounded by anxious uncles and cousins jostling for favour and position. Not a political animal or long-term strategist Richard’s short term solutions – murder, banishment, land grabs and heavy taxation – inevitably lead to his downfall to a man more popular with the people, Henry Bolingbroke. 

Of course this has a resonance with our world today and a production by a Palestinian company cannot help but reminds us of Mubarak’s fall in Egypt and the running battles on the streets of Syria and Bahrain. The production really came to life when flag waving protestors stormed the atrium, and when the King was pelted with orange peel by his disgruntled subjects. A ruling hierarchy costumed in the green army fatigues beloved of dictators, and sinister assassins in balaclavas were also uncomfortable echoes of current affairs.

This isn’t Ashtar’s first visit to Oxford. This globe-trotting company were here last here, working with Pegasus arts centre as part of the Mesh festival. They are a company intent on using theatre to get people thinking about issues of the day and do so as eloquent and passionate performers.

Oxfam HQs atrium is a stunning space and this performance made full use of all three levels in exploring King Richard’s inglorious end and Bolingbroke’s coronation as Henry IV. Richard’s declaration from the battlements of Flint castle was against a backdrop of clocks showing the time in Dakar, Delhi, Lima and Nairobi - a reminder that tyranny, unrest and revolution is happening in some country, somewhere in our world. And when the placards have been swept away the man wearing the crown might not be the leader hoped for.

One consequence, perhaps even advantage, of watching Shakespeare in a language you don’t speak, is the story is there to be grasped with an immediacy not interfered with by structured verse or over familiarity with famous speeches.The full synopsis provided and an on-stage screen summarising the key elements of each scene left the audience free to experience stirring rhetoric, despair and humour conveyed eloquently across a language barrier.

I am looking forward to Creation’s next collaboration with the Roy-e-Sabz company from Afghanistan performing Comedy of Errors on 6 June in another venue not often associated with theatre, The Sheldonian. This time the performance will be in Dari Persian, but as Ashtar Theatre say “the true friends of Shakespeare are the actors of his plays, not his readers.”