When the star-crossed lovers of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream are named Hang (Lysander), Byuk (Hermia), Ik (Helena), Ru (Demerits), Kabi (Titania) and Dot (Oberon), it's clear that this well-worn favorite has morphed into something else all together.
Though South Korea's Yohangza Theater Company has comprehensively reworked the original to create something almost unrecognizable, its production retains the original's impish spirit, which made it the toast of this year's Edinburgh Festival Fringe and one of the few foreign productions of Shakespeare to make it into the hallowed halls of London's Barbican Theater.
For all its success, it's hard to understand what relationship Yohangza's production has to do with Shakespeare's play at all, other than its title and some basic plot elements. Homing in on universal themes of lovers at cross-purposes and mischievous spirits let loose, Jung Ung-yang, the director and founder of the company, has condensed the comedy so that it involves just the six main characters along with comic roles of Puck and Bottom. The story is driven by physical theater and percussion music, which allows the production to cross language boundaries easily; the poetry of language is firmly relegated to second place. This is hardly a new development as Shakespeare has been dragooned into all kinds of unlikely mediums. Yohangza's version is yet another instance of the ubiquitous fusion of East and West.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF ARTS FESTIVAL
Yohangza's A Midsummer Night's Dream is lively, with plenty of folk elements that are well suited to the "pastoral" aspect of the original material, and the energy and comic mastery of the performers carry the show.
If you're looking for new insights into this much-loved play, you will be sadly disappointed. For that matter, A Midsummer Night's Dream also fails to open any windows on Korean culture, seeing as this play settles for making a few superficial twists to a well-known story.
As part of the 7th Taipei Arts Festival, A Midsummer Night's Dream fulfills its function of providing a new perspective on the world, but, above all else, it provides a warning as to the dangers of half-baked fusions, a warning that Taiwan's artistic community could only benefit from.
The year was 1991. A Toyota Land Cruiser set out on a 67km journey up the Junda Forest Road (郡大林道) toward an old loggers’ camp, at which point the hikers inside would get out and begin their ascent of Jade Mountain (玉山). Little did they know, they would be the last group of hikers to ever enjoy this shortcut into the mountains. An approaching typhoon soon wiped out the road behind them, trapping the vehicle on the mountain and forever changing the approach to Jade Mountain. THE CONTEMPORARY ROUTE Nowadays, the approach to Jade Mountain from the north side takes an
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
Relations between Taiwan and the Czech Republic have flourished in recent years. However, not everyone is pleased about the growing friendship between the two countries. Last month, an incident involving a Chinese diplomat tailing the car of vice president-elect Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) in Prague, drew public attention to the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) operations to undermine Taiwan overseas. The trip was not Hsiao’s first visit to the Central European country. It was meant to be low-key, a chance to meet with local academics and politicians, until her police escort noticed a car was tailing her through the Czech capital. The
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and