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Apart from the odd Shakespearean exception, from Othello the Moor of Venice to the Merchant of Venice’s marginal Moroccan suitor, The Prince of Morocco, Arabs have never pulled off a prominent presence on the British stage Strictly speaking, the examples cited aren’t even Arabs However, in recent years a burgeoning fashion for theatre from or about the Arab world has made Britain host to the Western world’s greatest cacophony of Arabic voices on stage   As the groundbreaking World Shakespeare Festival comes to a close, it is worth noting a salutary fact amid worsening international relations: there were more Arabic-language productions in Britain than in any other language besides English: Cymbeline at The Globe in Juba Arabic; Romeo and Juliet in Baghdad at the Swan Theatre in Iraqi Arabic; and a Palestinian Arabic production of Richard II, also at The Globe There even came a point a few weeks ago where it would have been possible to see Shakespeare in Arabic three days in a row   One might legitimately ask whether these Shakespeare performances are Arabic voices Shakespeare was no Arab, although some Arabs have been wont to pass him off as one; an Iraqi literary critic once joked that Shakespeare is an Anglicism of an Arab bard named Shaykh Zubair; who else but an Arab could hate Jews, Turks and the French with Shakespeare’s stubbornness?   Even amid The Globe’s Elizabethan awnings and Tudor beams, no one could doubt while watching the Ramallah-based Ashtar Theatre Company’s Richard II that this was an original Arabic voice, especially when a dethroned Richard rots in a morbidly Middle Eastern gaol (not necessarily Israeli, and the better for it) Meanwhile, a symbolically subverted (South) Sudanese Cymbeline sides with the ancient Britons against imperialRome, but – in a postcolonial twist – the Romans arrive dressed in the khakis of British imperialism   This was Shakespeare directed and performed by Arabs in Arabic Once, Shakespeare’s Arabs were ciphers for his voice – like countless Middle Eastern politicians, those Arabs were puppets at an Englishman’s mercy But at the World Shakespeare Festival, Shakespeare himself became a cipher for Arab voices In the