Rights groups query wisdom of Hamlet tour in N. Korea
Human rights groups have questioned the wisdom of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London taking a production of Hamlet to North Korea， but stopped short of calling for the plan to be scrapped.
The Globe will perform the play in the secretive state in September 2015 as part of a global tour marking the 450th anniversary of the English playwright’s birth.
But Phil Robertson， the deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia division， said exclusion would be the order of the day if the performance went ahead in Pyongyang. "It’s going to be an extremely limited， elite audience that would see a production in any case，" said Robertson.
Human rights group Amnesty International urged the theatre to "read up" on the reality of North Korea before going there. "No tragic play could come close to the misery that the 100，000 people trapped in the country’s prison camps endure -- where torture， rape， starvation and execution are everyday occurrences，" Amnesty said in a statement.
"When the North Korean leadership gets around to reading the plot of Hamlet， one imagines they might well insist on something else from the canon，" suggested Robertson.
羅伯森還說，「如果北韓領導人有時間去讀讀哈姆雷特的劇本，我想他們可能會堅持要換另一齣戲。」
The play revolves around family feuds and Hamlet’s eventual killing of his uncle， echoing recent events in North Korea where leader Kim Jong-Un’s regime ordered the execution of his uncle Jang Song-Thaek in December last year.