Ever since it premiered in 2003, Declan Donnellan’s Twelfth Night, an all-male Russian-language production of the much-loved Shakespeare comedy, has received rave reviews. It will be showing at the National Theater this weekend with, said the organizers, Chinese and Russian subtitles. English speakers hoping for a fix of the Bard had better know their text.
Twelfth Night is a joint production by Donnellan and the Chekhov International Theater Festival, and is one of many innovative Shakespearean productions that have won Cheek by Jowl, Donnellan’s production company, a three-year residency at London’s Barbican Theater.
Cheek by Jowl — the name comes from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream — has a long-standing devotion to the classics, but is famous for the freshness of its adaptations.
The production, which premiered in Moscow but has since toured Europe, the UK and US. According to a New York Times review, Donnellan’s production has discovered “an alchemical substance in Shakespeare that transcends the verbal.” Whatever this substance is, local directors, who continue to flail about when adapting Western works — most notably in James Liang’s (梁志民) recent bloodless reworking of Othello (針峰對決) — should be looking hard to discover what exactly that is.
For most, Shakespeare’s genius is thought of largely in linguistic terms, but Donnellan seems to have transcended this barrier, and in the same review: “The words, it seems, are but steppingstones to a universal pattern of images and insights about human behavior and the perplexing world that thwarts and shapes it. Shakespeare’s first language, it would seem, is not English, after all; it’s Theater.”
Similar experiments in non-linguistic drama are in the works: Ethan Chen’s The Drought Goddess (大神魃), which will premiere at the Experimental Theater from Dec. 19 to Dec. 21 as part of 2008 New Ideas Theater Festival (2008新點子劇展), includes a mix of Chinese dialects and singing styles that the director referred to as “rubbish talk.”
For beleaguered theater directors in Taiwan grappling with the problem of adapting of Chinese opera to contemporary theater, Donnellan’s success in England and the US with a foreign-language production of England’s greatest poet is likely to be encouraging.
If you are a Western and especially a white foreign resident of Taiwan, you’ve undoubtedly had the experience of Taiwanese assuming you to be an English teacher. There are cultural and economic reasons for this, but one of the greatest determinants is the narrow range of work permit categories that exist for Taiwan’s foreign residents, which has in turn created an unofficial caste system for foreigners. Until recently, laowai (老外) — the Mandarin term for “foreigners,” which also implies citizenship in a rich, Western country and distinguishable from brown-skinned, southeast Asian migrant laborers, or wailao (外勞) — could only ever
Sept. 23 to Sept. 29 The construction of the Babao Irrigation Canal (八堡圳) was not going well. Large-scale irrigation structures were almost unheard of in Taiwan in 1709, but Shih Shih-pang (施世榜) was determined to divert water from the Jhuoshuei River (濁水溪) to the Changhua plain, where he owned land, to promote wet rice cultivation. According to legend, a mysterious old man only known as Mr. Lin (林先生) appeared and taught Shih how to use woven conical baskets filled with rocks called shigou (石笱) to control water diversion, as well as other techniques such as surveying terrain by observing shadows during
In recent weeks news outlets have been reporting on rising rents. Last year they hit a 27 year high. It seems only a matter of time before they become a serious political issue. Fortunately, there is a whole political party that is laser focused on this issue, the Taiwan Statebuilding Party (TSP). They could have had a seat or two in the legislature, or at least, be large enough to attract media attention to the rent issue from time to time. Unfortunately, in the last election, Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) Chairman Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) acted as a vote sink for
This is a film about two “fools,” according to the official synopsis. But admirable ones. In his late thirties, A-jen quits his high-paying tech job and buys a plot of land in the countryside, hoping to use municipal trash to revitalize the soil that has been contaminated by decades of pesticide and chemical fertilizer use. Brother An-ho, in his 60s, on the other hand, began using organic methods to revive the dead soil on his land 30 years ago despite the ridicule of his peers, methodically picking each pest off his produce by hand without killing them out of respect