Shakespeare on the Yangtze
A dream team of playwrights join forces 400 years after their deaths, writes Dionne Christian
They call them leftover women — shengu in Mandarin — because they’ve reached their late 20s and haven’t yet found husbands. It’s a phenomenon in modern China but one that single, well-educated, professional
20-something women around the world may relate to.
Despite education and success, they’re under enormous pressure to marry and the longer it takes, the more they’re regarded as “leftover”. As this wasn’t an issue in the 16th and 17th centuries, what might the then-contemporary playwrights have to say about it?
Pass the works of William Shakespeare or China’s Tang Xianzu to 21st century theatre companies — one from England, the other from China — and it becomes apparent that insight on a modern dilemma can be found here.
Whereas in the West, Shakespeare is celebrated as our greatest playwright with the most influence on our theatre, in China, it’s Tang Xianzu who is esteemed and has left a lasting literary legacy. Both men died in 1616 but in
2016, the two were brought togetherby Londonbased Gecko Theatre and the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre.
And yes, says Ophelia Huang, head of SDAC’s international division, schoolchildren in China have to study Tang and they complain that now no one speaks like that. But performances of his major work — the Mudan Ting (The Peony
Pavilion) — are more or less confined to traditional Chinese opera companies.
“And if you present a full show, for a school, it’s more than eight hours long so it means very few people have seen a full production.”
To mark the 400th anniversary when, in the West at least, everyone else was trying to think of something new and novel to do with Shakespeare, it seemed a more imaginative undertaking to unite him with a contemporary.
The result is The Dreamer, which arrives in Auckland as part of the city’s annual arts festival after performances in China and the United Kingdom. Inspired by A Midsummer Night’s
Dream (MND) and Tang’s mythical romance The
Peony Pavilion, it’s a story told through movement with limited spoken dialogue in English and Mandarin.
Rich Rusk doesn’t want to start a conspiracy theory — but the associate director of Gecko chuckles a little and ponders the coincidence of two of the greatest playwrights living and dying around the same time and writing about similar things. Even though they were on opposite sides of the world. In the 16th and 17th centuries.
“They were two of the greatest theatrical minds and they died in the same year. Who would have thought?” “I think that, had they met, they would have sat down and picked apart how stories work. There might have been a bit of one-upmanship … ”
But, say Rusk and Huang, maybe the similarity of some of their stories proves Shakespeare and Tang really were the best of attentive, articulate and enduring playwrights. They saw and appreciated the human condition, which is essentially the same whether you’re in London or Linchuan, Jiangxi.
Take love and marriage. When Rusk, Huang and their two companies, talked about what story to tell, both were struck by the fact that dream sequences feature prominently in Shakespeare and Tang’s works.
Although Shakespeare’s tragedies are wellknown in China, his comedies are not, so using
A Midsummer Night’s Dream appealed because it was a chance to introduce those audiences to a new side of the Bard.
In the UK, MND is one of Shakespeare’s most popular so it appealed there as a crowd-pleaser, and when they looked long and hard at the characters, it was the women who stood out, notably the young lover Helena.
“She’s wandering around, a little bit lost, looking for love,” says Rusk. “In contemporary Shanghai, trying to find love is seen as a problem especially for unmarried women in their 20s.
“We knew we had found a connection — a really powerful one — and the driving force of a character who doesn’t want to be ‘leftover’ so dreams of a man but then realises it’s not about finding love, but about finding herself.”
Huang says the collaboration has been successful — five-star reviews — and she’s looking forward to its first performances outside of China and the UK.