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.
Under pressure, President William Lai (賴清德) has enacted his first cabinet reshuffle. Whether it will be enough to staunch the bleeding remains to be seen. Cabinet members in the Executive Yuan almost always end up as sacrificial lambs, especially those appointed early in a president’s term. When presidents are under pressure, the cabinet is reshuffled. This is not unique to any party or president; this is the custom. This is the case in many democracies, especially parliamentary ones. In Taiwan, constitutionally the president presides over the heads of the five branches of government, each of which is confusingly translated as “president”
By 1971, heroin and opium use among US troops fighting in Vietnam had reached epidemic proportions, with 42 percent of American servicemen saying they’d tried opioids at least once and around 20 percent claiming some level of addiction, according to the US Department of Defense. Though heroin use by US troops has been little discussed in the context of Taiwan, these and other drugs — produced in part by rogue Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) armies then in Thailand and Myanmar — also spread to US military bases on the island, where soldiers were often stoned or high. American military policeman
An attempt to promote friendship between Japan and countries in Africa has transformed into a xenophobic row about migration after inaccurate media reports suggested the scheme would lead to a “flood of immigrants.” The controversy erupted after the Japan International Cooperation Agency, or JICA, said this month it had designated four Japanese cities as “Africa hometowns” for partner countries in Africa: Mozambique, Nigeria, Ghana and Tanzania. The program, announced at the end of an international conference on African development in Yokohama, will involve personnel exchanges and events to foster closer ties between the four regional Japanese cities — Imabari, Kisarazu, Sanjo and
The Venice Film Festival kicked off with the world premiere of Paolo Sorrentino’s La Grazia Wednesday night on the Lido. The opening ceremony of the festival also saw Francis Ford Coppola presenting filmmaker Werner Herzog with a lifetime achievement prize. The 82nd edition of the glamorous international film festival is playing host to many Hollywood stars, including George Clooney, Julia Roberts and Dwayne Johnson, and famed auteurs, from Guillermo del Toro to Kathryn Bigelow, who all have films debuting over the next 10 days. The conflict in Gaza has also already been an everpresent topic both outside the festival’s walls, where
RSS