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.
Last week gave us the droll little comedy of People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) consul general in Osaka posting a threat on X in response to Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi saying to the Diet that a Chinese attack on Taiwan may be an “existential threat” to Japan. That would allow Japanese Self Defence Forces to respond militarily. The PRC representative then said that if a “filthy neck sticks itself in uninvited, we will cut it off without a moment’s hesitation. Are you prepared for that?” This was widely, and probably deliberately, construed as a threat to behead Takaichi, though it
Nov. 17 to Nov. 23 When Kanori Ino surveyed Taipei’s Indigenous settlements in 1896, he found a culture that was fading. Although there was still a “clear line of distinction” between the Ketagalan people and the neighboring Han settlers that had been arriving over the previous 200 years, the former had largely adopted the customs and language of the latter. “Fortunately, some elders still remember their past customs and language. But if we do not hurry and record them now, future researchers will have nothing left but to weep amid the ruins of Indigenous settlements,” he wrote in the Journal of
Even after years in business, weekend tables here can be booked out a month in advance. The price point far exceeds its competitors. Granted, expectations are soaringly high, but something here failed to hit the high notes. There are a few telltale signs that a restaurant relies solely on outstanding food to create the experience, no gimmicks or distractions needed. La Mole is such a restaurant. The atmosphere is food-forward, with an open kitchen center stage. Our tables are simple; no candles, no dim lighting, no ambient music. The menu is brief, and our waiter directs most
If China attacks, will Taiwanese be willing to fight? Analysts of certain types obsess over questions like this, especially military analysts and those with an ax to grind as to whether Taiwan is worth defending, or should be cut loose to appease Beijing. Fellow columnist Michael Turton in “Notes from Central Taiwan: Willing to fight for the homeland” (Nov. 6, page 12) provides a superb analysis of this topic, how it is used and manipulated to political ends and what the underlying data shows. The problem is that most analysis is centered around polling data, which as Turton observes, “many of these
RSS