The Shakespeare Factory Players will be bringing “Much Ado About Nothing” to Cooper Park this Saturday, September 4. Fortunately, they won’t be doing it in Klingon. It’s hard enough to understand all that 16th century English without the added difficulty of comprehending it in an alien tongue.
But, that hasn’t stopped The Washington Shakespeare Company. According to the Washington Post:
The Washington Shakespeare Company, that Arlington outpost of offbeat treatments of classic plays, is going where no D.C. enterprise has ever quite gone before, offering up a whole evening of Shakespeare — in Klingon.
At the company’s annual benefit Sept. 25 in Rosslyn, selections from “Hamlet” and “Much Ado About Nothing” will be performed in the language that was invented for the Klingon characters of the “Star Trek” films. Actors will be speaking the verse in two languages, English and Klingon, and the lines in each will correspond to the Bard’s signature meter: iambic pentameter. The translations are courtesy of the Klingon Language Institute, a Pennsylvania group that published “The Klingon Hamlet” several years ago, in addition to composing the Klingon version of “Much Ado About Nothing.”
Sounds like fun. Maybe? But here in Sykesville, being a bit on the conservative side, we prefer our Shakespeare in English.