It seems fitting that as Taiwan heads into a long weekend to mark Children’s Day and Tomb Sweeping Day, a production of Hamlet is being staged at the National Theater in Taipei.
After all, what is Hamlet if not a musing on dead ancestors and the roles of parents and children — like Gertrude and Hamlet, Ophelia and Polonius.
However, the OKT/Vilnius City Theatre show is not your average production of Shakespeare’s tortured Dane. For one thing, he is Lithuanian. For another, the leads are all middle-aged.
Photo courtesy of Dmitrij Matvejev
This version, by acclaimed stage director Oskaras Korsunovas and produced by the OKT/Vilnius City Theatre, is in Taiwan as part of the Taiwan International Festival of Arts (TIFA). It has traveled widely since its premiere on Nov. 20, 2008.
Korsunovas, 48, is something of a theatrical wunderkind.
He has directed more than 60 plays since his first at age 21, launched the repertory-based Oskaras Korsunovas Theatre — now known as the OKT/Vilnius City Theatre — with some like-minded colleagues when he was just 29 and became the youngest winner of Europe Theatre Prize for New Realities in 2001 when he was 32.
Photo courtesy of Dmitrij Matvejev
He won the prize again five years later, just one of the dozens of awards that he or his works have collected in the past two-and-a-half decades.
TOPICAL MATERIAL
Korsunovas believes that Hamlet “is the most topical play for our times”
Photo courtesy of Dmitrij Matvejev
“For a director, staging Hamlet is a bit like getting married. It is something you feel you’ll have to do, when the time is right. And sooner or later the time will be right,” Korsunovas told Swedish art curator and writer Anders Kreuger in an interview posted on the Europe Theater Prize Web site.
“The life of any younger person in the early 21st century is Hamlet-like in a fundamental sense. All answers to what is happening to us now are to be found in our recent past.”
He has also been quoted as saying that the only reason he stages Shakespeare’s plays “is the opportunity to talk about nowadays, about my personal experience within his plays.”
In Korsunovas’ production, Hamlet is a play within a play, with Darius Meskauskas, who plays the melancholy prince as the director — although sometimes he is also just an extra, and at others more of a puppet.
The actors are seated at a line of nine mirrored dressing tables as the audience enters the theater. The mirrors play a crucial role throughout the production, as the actors/characters are forced to confront their own reflections and illusions, as well as serving as mobile walls to delineate new scenes.
No surprise that Korsunovas is also credited with the set design, along with Agne Kuzmickaite.
He has tinkered quite a bit with the Bard’s script, cutting out huge bits and speeding up the plot, while having one actor play two or more roles, such as Dainius Gavenonis, who plays Claudius and the ghost of Hamlet’s father.
The show runs about three hours, with intermission. It will be performed in Lithuanian, with Chinese and English surtitles.
It comes with an advisory that it is not suitable for those under the age of 18 and contains scenes of violence and smoking.
Probably as a result of the long holiday weekend, there are still seats available in all prices ranges for all three shows, a rarity for TIFA productions.
There will be a pre-show talk (in Chinese) in the theater lobby starting 30 minutes before curtain and a post-show talk after Sunday’s matinee.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist