The World Shakespeare Festival launched this week with the news that artists from all over the world will perform together in a UK-wide festival next year, and amongst them a troupe from Afghanistan.

In fact the Afghan actresses and actors gave our Country Director in Afghanistan, Paul Smith, a taste of what to expect just days before the devastating attack on our Kabul compound last month.

This blog, which was written before but held back after the attack, now stands as both a glimpse of the work we were doing in Afghanistan at the time and a restatement of the power of creative cultural engagement.

I’ve just been watching Afghan actresses and actors rehearsing Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors in our compound in Kabul.

I’m told to keep these blogs short, but I’m going to have to repeat that: I’ve just been watching Afghan actors and actresses rehearsing Shakespeare at the British Council in Kabul!

How’s that for an undermining of stereotypes?

Shakespeare’s delicious early farce was rendered in Dari by feisty henpecking women and comedic browbeaten men in a production destined, during what we hope will be a wide-roaming tour, for London’s Globe Theatre next spring.

There’s a distinguished dramatic tradition in Afghanistan, both in terms of centuries-old rural folklore performance and the more Western boulevard theatre that filled the stalls and dress circle in 50s/60s Kabul.

I can’t pretend that the Mujahideen and the Taliban were great patrons of the proscenium arch and, with the securing of public gatherings still nightmarish here, the Shaftesbury Avenue milieu has hardly returned.

But performance is creeping back through film and TV; I’ve just seen an hilarious preview for the Afghan version of The Office. And there is a growth in the commissioning of mobile theatre using drama as a means of exploring key issues such as opium production, gender and community health in the Afghan provinces and villages.

But an Afghan Adriana of Ephesus and Dromio of Syracuse chasing each other around the thrust stage of the Globe before a goggle-eyed and culturally challenged London audience? That’s something else.

I can’t wait to be in that audience, watching those caricature assumptions tumble.

Where be thy burqas and body armour now?

The Independent newspaper – Afghan actors to bring the Bard to London

Read other blogs by Paul Smith, British Council Country Director, Afghanistan

Find out more about British Council projects in Afghanistan