Celebrating its 20th anniversary, the Godot Theater Company (果陀劇場) has taken on the huge task of staging a Chinese-language version of Othello. The production premiered at the end of last month in Kaohsiung, and yesterday opened at the Metropolitan Hall in Taipei. Godot has had plenty of experience adapting Western works for the Chinese stage, but a work by Shakespeare was an especial challenge, for which they brought in the talents of two of Taiwan’s greatest stage actors, Li Li-qun (李立群) and Chin Shih-jie (金士傑).
The show has been enormously anticipated, and a final dress rehearsal on Thursday played before an almost full house of friends of the company, theatrical insiders and media. The celebratory atmosphere was very much in evidence, but, sad to say, the show itself was less than riveting.
I had gone into the performance with some degree of trepidation, having seen Li in the early rehearsals of the production done up in boot polish makeup and Chin sporting a prosthetic nose that gave him a sly look. This would have been bad enough, but this literalism seems to have been carried through into many other aspects of the production as well, to the considerable detriment of any real dramatic interest.
One of the great challenges of the production had been to produce a script that would be accessible to the masses. Contemporary Chinese vernacular is used throughout, but the writers seemed uncertain of how close they should keep to the letter of the original. It was in the occasional departures, all too few, that the language gained some natural vigor, but otherwise actors where left floundering with lines that were at best plodding, and sometimes so unnatural as to approach parody.
The desire to bring stars to the stage clearly outweighed other considerations. Li and Chin showed flashes of their prodigious talents, but neither could sustain roles for which they were unsuited. Neither was convincing as veteran soldiers of bloody campaigns, for both are bookish and articulate rather than physical actors. Li’s Othello never had a sufficiently commanding physical presence, and Chin worked so hard at being sly, seemingly unconvinced that his words could achieve this effect, that he created a parody that might have been funny had it been intentional.
One of the greatest difficulties that the play failed to overcome is the inherent absurdity of the story. Take away the intricately layered language of Shakespeare, and what is left is the story of a rather stupid and jealous man who kills his wife. As Othello works through his own tortuous logic to convince himself of his wife’s infidelity, there is more laughter than tears among the audience. Without the heroic and the tragic, what’s left? To make the dialogue accessible, the producers have pretty much gutted the play, and the best efforts of the actors could not save it.
All this is not helped by the bombastic score that simply couldn’t leave any emotional point alone, constantly building tension with deep bass notes and underlining tender emotion with caressing violins. Once again, it’s as if the producers can’t trust the script to get the point across. So intrusive was the music, and so crass (one section sounded as if it was lifted from Phantom of the Opera) that it would hardly have been surprising if the characters had suddenly burst into song. It would at least have been diverting, and Godot has a reputation for producing musicals.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have gone into the theater looking for Shakespeare, for he had clearly left the building. What I found was a brave effort to what may have been an inherently impossible task — a serious and accessible production of a Shakespearean tragedy. The most tragic thing about Godot’s Othello was watching two talented actors floundering and eventually being overcome by forces they could no longer control. They were victims of a play that didn’t know where it wanted to go.
What was the population of Taiwan when the first Negritos arrived? In 500BC? The 1st century? The 18th? These questions are important, because they can contextualize the number of babies born last month, 6,523, to all the people on Taiwan, indigenous and colonial alike. That figure represents a year on year drop of 3,884 babies, prefiguring total births under 90,000 for the year. It also represents the 26th straight month of deaths exceeding births. Why isn’t this a bigger crisis? Because we don’t experience it. Instead, what we experience is a growing and more diverse population. POPULATION What is Taiwan’s actual population?
After Jurassic Park premiered in 1993, people began to ask if scientists could really bring long-lost species back from extinction, just like in the hit movie. The idea has triggered “de-extinction” debates in several countries, including Taiwan, where the focus has been on the Formosan clouded leopard (designated after 1917 as Neofelis nebulosa brachyura). National Taiwan Museum’s (NTM) Web site describes the Formosan clouded leopard as “a subspecies endemic to Taiwan…it reaches a body length of 0.6m to 1.2m and tail length of 0.7m to 0.9m and weighs between 15kg and 30kg. It is entirely covered with beautiful cloud-like spots
For the past five years, Sammy Jou (周祥敏) has climbed Kinmen’s highest peak, Taiwu Mountain (太武山) at 6am before heading to work. In the winter, it’s dark when he sets out but even at this hour, other climbers are already coming down the mountain. All of this is a big change from Jou’s childhood during the Martial Law period, when the military requisitioned the mountain for strategic purposes and most of it was off-limits. Back then, only two mountain trails were open, and they were open only during special occasions, such as for prayers to one’s ancestors during Lunar New Year.
March 23 to March 29 Kao Chang (高長) set strict rules for his descendants: women were to learn music or cooking, and the men medicine or theology. No matter what life path they chose, they were to use their skills in service of the Presbyterian Church and society. As a result, musical ability — particularly in Western instruments — was almost expected among the Kao women, and even those who married into the family often had musical training. Although the men did not typically play instruments, they played a supporting role, helping to organize music programs such as children’s orchestras, writes
RSS