Q Life Magazine Q Magazine December 2016 | Page 36

| Issue 1
| Premier Skills Football Tournament, Qatar UK Year of Culture 2013, Al Sadd Sports Club, Doha, Qatar
The Great
British Festival
The Great British Festival Qatar is an annual celebration of
UK-Qatari relations in Doha.
D
uring two weeks in March, over
40 events were held in Doha to
showcase the best of British culture,
education, tourism, and business.
This ranged from the launch of
new British-inspired menus at hotels
across the city to presentations
from British researchers from
University College London in
Qatar on recent archaeological
investigations in the country. The
festival is a testament to the strong
and eclectic bilateral relationship.
The centrepiece of this year’s
Qatar Great British Festival
36
was three events marking the
400th anniversary of the death
of William Shakespeare. The
Reduced Shakespeare Company
performed a compilation of all his
plays in under 100 minutes, there
was a giant screening of arguably
the best film adaptation of Much
Ado About Nothing, and Qatar’s
Philharmonic Orchestra played a
selection of famous music inspired
by Shakespeare’s writing.
The Qatar Football Association and
Aspire Academy also organised a
special edition of the Hadaf five-a
side schools’ football tournament,
which featured five independent and
five British curriculum under-16
school teams.
The festival was launched in 2014 to
build on the success of the Qatar-
UK 2013 Year of Culture, a cultural
exchange programme established
by Qatar Museums and held in
partnership with the British Council,
Qatar’s Ministry of Culture, Arts
and Heritage, and the British
Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
The Festival reinforces the strong
bilateral bond between Qatar and