Theater as life

Taiwanese academic Iris Tuan’s latest book of criticism is eclectic, polymathic and a joy to read

Iris Tuan (段馨君) is a professor at Taiwan’s National Yang Ming Tung University, with strong links to Harvard. Her previous work Pop with Gods, Shakespeare, and AI was full of a wide range of topics, such as feminism, post-structuralism and films of Shakespeare — Baz Luhrmann’s beautiful Romeo and Juliet, for instance. What will Beyond Shakespeare be like?

Well, there was a plague in Shakespeare’s time (Lear, Macbeth and Titus Andronicus were written during plague years), food and drink in Shakespeare (audiences ate and drank during his plays), sonnets, zombies, touring theater companies, Stan Lai (賴聲川), David Henry Hwang (黃哲倫) and Downton Abbey.

There is, in other words, a similar eclecticism in this book, together with a constant emphasis on performance. Tuan’s PhD was in theatre studies. If a play has been filmed, made into a TV series or just simply performed, Iris Tuan rakes it in as grist for her comprehensive mill.

Titus Andronicus is interesting, full of horrors such as people having their hands chopped off and biting out their tongue (though Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy

also has a tongue bitten off and spat out). It’s conceivable that such grotesqueness was considered only suitable for an aristocratic audience, and in a time of plague, when the public theaters were closed, a private performance for ticket-buying gentry was the only option. Of course, the on-stage blinding of Gloucester in King Lear was certainly visible to all comers, so you can never be sure. Anyway, there was a time when people considered Titus Andronicus was too horrific to be by Shakespeare at all, until, that is, Peter Brook directed a sensational production at Stratford in 1955 that made it look like a masterpiece.

THE LIVING DEAD

What does Tuan mean by zombies? Normally the word refers to dead people who are supposedly brought back to life. In this book, Tuan opts to look at two films that are in effect zombie versions of Romeo and Juliet,(Warm Bodies, 2013), and Titus Andronicus (Titus, 1999). In these, the “living dead” represent fear, anxiety, disorder and global crisis.

As far as travelling theater companies in Shakespeare’s time, the most famous instance in the plays is in Hamlet.

Tuan makes the comparison with COVID-19, inevitably. She goes on to cite Cervantes, the great Spanish playwright, who never met Shakespeare but who died on the same day that he did.

A Hakka play, Hold on, love! , that derives from, among other things, Shakespeare’s great comedy As You Like It,

comes next. And in many chapters Shakespeare’s Sonnet Number 116 (“Let me not to the marriage of true minds”) features. A side-note here is that this book stays with Shakespeare far more than did its predecessor, Pop with Gods.

Stan Lai and David Henry Hwang get a chapter each. Lai’s plays Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land (1992) and River/Cloud (2021) are prominent, while David Henry Hwang’s controversial Flower Drum Song (1961) — controversial on account of racial questions over its casting; should the lead character be Asian or European? — and M. Butterfly (1988) receive close analysis.

DEAD READERS

Tuan refers to us as “dear readers” in her chapter on the “neo-noir” Altered Carbon (2018 - 2020), referring back first to Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner of 1982. Issues such as the possibility of sex with the body of a deceased boyfriend, plus “sex, violence, class, power, death, desire, dreams, memories, eroticism, immortality and AI” all feature in this analysis of Altered Carbon.

Downton Abbey, as in the film Downton Abbey 2019, feels a little out of place here, partly because it is British and was filmed some 65 miles from London. Much use, incidentally, is made of Lisa Blackman’s book Immaterial Bodies, Affect, Embodiment, Meditation, though many items not formally analyzed are quoted, even To Be or Not to Be.

Whether our author is considering productions of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice that continue to represent Shylock as the archetypal Jewish villain, whether she’s anxious to show Downton Abbey is continuous with American movies as well as profoundly different from them, whether she’s quoting, in her conclusion, Virginia Woolf’s extended essay A Room of One’s Own (which argues that women writers need a room of their own and a private income to succeed), or whether she refers back to Shakespeare, endlessly in reality, her fundamental precept is that theatre represents life, as do all the other forms of performance art including ice-skating.

This, then, is an ambitious book, as was its predecessor. Both books take on a huge amount of material and rake in other works to support Tuan’s analysis. She is in the tradition of bilingual Taiwanese academics who add splendor to both of the countries they have worked in. That her current permanent position is in Taiwan says a lot.

That being said, it remains the case that the majority of the works discussed are non-Taiwanese, with the exception of Lai and Hwang.

But the very mix, of Taiwanese and non-Taiwanese, is of the essence in this book. Tuan is nothing if not a polymath, and this is a central pillar of her strength as a critic. The sheer breadth of her reading (she refers to “an office of her own”) makes it very hard to be critical.

So all praise to Palgrave MacMillan for championing this author and to the National Yang Ming Tung University for granting her a professorship.