It’s another week before the long-anticipated production of Othello (針鋒對決) by the Godot Theater Company (果陀劇場) premieres in Kaohsiung, but with headliners Li Li-qun (李立群) and Chin Shih-jie (金士傑), two of Taiwan’s most accomplished stage actors, ticket sales are likely to be brisk. The show will open at Taipei’s Metropolitan Hall (城市舞台) on Sept. 18.
Godot is an old hand at adapting Western classics into Chinese (including two works by Shakespeare), but even a long-time collaborator such as Li, who is now based in China, said that “I haven’t been to a performance of Shakespeare in Chinese in which I haven’t fallen asleep. As a performer, if a member of the audience falls asleep (because of the performance), then it’s my problem. My responsibility in performing in this play is to make sure that nobody falls asleep,” he said half jokingly in a meeting with the press earlier this month.
Shakespeare has been adapted into many languages, and a number of non-English productions have received the very highest accolades, but Li accepts that linguistic and cultural differences presented an insuperable challenge.
“Put the play into Chinese, and all those beautiful words become one of the play’s biggest obstacles,” he said. He told the audience at the media event that when he started reading the original play for this production, he thought it shouldn’t even be attempted. How can modern Chinese people put on a play that was written in English blank verse of 400 years ago, in which the rhythms of the language are such an evocative part of the performance? “We simply have to accept going into a production like this that we would be abandoning the language of Shakespeare from the get go,” Li said.
Coming from the mouth of one of Taiwan’s great comic actors, this was not greatly encouraging, but Li had confidence that the production could preserve the spirit of the play despite a script in the modern Chinese vernacular. “We want to make the language understandable for the audience, but we certainly want to preserve the Shakespearean spirit. If we don’t, all that would be left would be the bare bones of the story, and that’s no good to anyone,” he said.
That will be the great challenge for this production, but the fact that it has been found necessary to put Li, who plays the title role, into a tight perm and blacken him up like a black-and-white minstrel, and give Chin (who plays Iago) a hooked prosthetic nose, makes this reviewer despair. Shades of vaudeville seem to linger about the rehearsals, and this can only be the kiss of death for any real sense of tragedy.
Li and Chin got together six years ago to put on the enormously successful play ART, an adaptation from a work by the emerging French playwright Yasmina Reza. But even then, while the box office for that adaptation must have been gratifying, Godot’s version failed to achieve the feather-light sparkle that relies on the kind of shorthand of visual and spoken cues — body language, costume, turns of phrase, accents.
This adaptation of Othello may face similar problems of being neither English nor Chinese, but an uncomfortable mixture of the two. But to see if the production team, and its big-ticket cast, is able to bridge the gap between Elizabethan England and 21st century Taipei should prove extremely interesting to watch.
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