Productions marked by nation, as in the Globe to Globe Festival, trigger expectations for the audience, expectations sometimes based on the slimmest amount of information about the country presenting Shakespeare. But as I walk into the yard for an early Sunday evening performance of Othello by the Q Brothers, a company from the USA, my native country, I am anticipating what ‘our’ offering might be like. Where in the Festival booklet words like IsiZule, SeSotho, Māori, Russian, Swahili, Juba Arabic and Palestinian Arabic appear before the ‘/’ followed by the name of the theatre company, tonight it reads Hip Hop. If a shut-in who never listened to radio or television wandered into the Globe this night, you might forgive him or her for thinking they were about to hear a play in ‘bunny’ by the National Rabbit Theatre.

One quick glance around the space confirms, however, the popularity of the Globe's decision to host a hip-hop production: the theatre is packed – at least one-third more people tonight in the theatre than in any of the productions I have seen thus far. As with the Russian production of Measure for Measure, I am immediately aware of the curse and blessing of Globe acoustics. The blessing is how good they are; the curse is that with artificial amplification having been added for the first time at this Festival, sound now blasts out in odd jagged spurts because of both the placement of the speakers in relation to where one is standing – in a packed yard it is easier to manoeuvre from the side but the sound on the side is much louder – and the uneven nature of recorded sound in relation to where bodies are on stage.