Over the past six weeks, we at the Globe have put on a festival called Globe to Globe. The concept (an idea of Dominic Dromgoole’s) was always very simple to explain: all of Shakespeare’s plays, each in a different language. But the reality of that, of course, was unprecedented, unwieldy and just plain large. It’s impossible, particularly with hangovers literal and metaphorical, to sum up what it meant to the hundreds of actors, the tens of thousands of audience members (the vast majority of whom had never been to the Globe before), or the hardy souls who stood through every single play.

We’re fresh out of superlatives. The Globe to Globe season has put a girdle around the earth in 37 languages, and the visiting companies have now left the building. You have to high-five the Globe’s chutzpah for mounting this wondrous contribution to London 2012’s World Shakespeare Festival in the first place. But in quite properly keeping the biggest till last, it surely took extra testicles to stage the famous play about a royal family in turmoil on this of all weekends.

Productions at the life-changing Globe to Globe sequence of international takes on the Bard have had numerous points of origin, from shows conceived directly for the event to reprises of stagings that in the case of the Brazilian Romeo and Juliet was decades old. So why shouldn't France of all countries deliver a Much Ado About Nothing straight from the charcuterie? Here was arguably Shakespeare's most affecting and nuanced comedy served up with funny voices, exaggerated gestures and an extra helping of jambon. 

Diamonds one day, stones the next: compulsive giver Timon’s swift descent into raving misanthropy would be better packed into a gritty pop ballad than a full-length play. Still, Shakespeare just about pulls it off: having had more of a hindering than a helping hand from Thomas Middleton in early scenes, he comes into his own with howling, Lear-like invective.

The Comedy of Errors may not be one of Shakespeare’s most notable plays, yet this production embodied the essence of the Globe to Globe season. While the play was lent new kinds of hilarity and colour when interpreted within a different culture, I can’t begin to imagine what appearing in The Globe must have meant to the troupe performing it.

Now here's a surprise. In English, Henry VIII gets dismissed as a Shakespearean dud (well, let's apportion the blame as well to the play's generally acknowledged co-author, John Fletcher), its karma not exactly enhanced by one's awareness that this was the play that was being performed when the original Globe burned down in June, 1613. Happily, the only fire in evidence in the Globe to Globe's contribution from Spain was that communicated by its brio-filled, impassioned cast, for whom a potential theatrical pageant fairly pulsated with life. 

It's both easy and fashionable to render ironic, or scoff at, the title of All's Well That Ends Well. This is the Shakespeare "comedy" in which the rabidly obsessed Helena finally ensnares her none-too-doting Bertram in a putative happy ending that tends to be played as if the pair are advancing toward the gallows. But it's in the way of Shakespeare's Globe in general and the miraculous Globe to Globe season in particular that, as served up by the Arpana theatre company from Mumbai, one of the Bard's three problem plays emerges as both jubilant and touching.

Had one listened to the Chiten company from Kyoto performing Coriolanus with one’s eyes closed, it would have seemed as if the stage were teeming with performers. And without understanding a word of Japanese, a theatregoer could respond to the gamut of moods and rhetoric of the play, from mob fury met with autocratic disdain to political conniving and on to maternal grief and horror: all were audibly evident in a collective tour de force of verbal dexterity, range and expression.

"37 Plays. 37 Languages." This is the tagline for the Globe Theatre's Globe to Globe season, hosting theatre companies from every corner of the world. The season may be international in outlook, yet the language used to perform this version of Love's Labour's Lost is at once home-grown, yet very different from the words of Shakespeare.

In the Globe to Globe season, the Caucasus is proving as fruitful a ground as any for new views on old texts. Georgia’s Marjanishvili company, under director Levan Tsuladze, proved the region has a special style with their version of As You Like It, no less strongly than Armenia’s King John had a couple of days earlier.