Julie Sanders, Fifteen Eighty Four
April 30, 2014
At the 42nd Hong Kong Arts Festival in March 2014, Beijing director Tian Qinxin presented her National Theatre of China production of Romeo and Juliet in Putonghua with Chinese and English surtitles. Starring television idols Li Guangjie and Yin Tao and with the action located in a fictional mainland town called Verona, CCTV (the Chinese national broadcaster) described the production in the following terms: ‘Bicycles, sunglasses and hip-hop dancing […]. It’s an image of Chinese youth that I recognize all too well from the lively High Street congregations that exist on my own campus, The University of Nottingham Ningbo China, where I am currently Vice-Provost of the first Sino-Foreign university to be founded after new state legislation was passed in China in 2003.
Tian Qinxin’s stated intention is to make Shakespeare relevant to exactly those communities of dynamic and highly creative young people that I work with on a daily basis. She aims to achieve that through a blending of both British and Chinese cultures and via a conscious updating of Shakespeare to ‘talk like one of us’, which is to say to talk in a modern Chinese dialect and idiom. In the process she seeks to challenge a tradition of overly deferential Shakespearean adaptations in the Chinese theatre context. ‘Shakespeare’s plays were introduced to China in the 1940s, but I think we are still at the stage of doing straight interpretations’, she has stated in interview, adding, ‘I hope this time we can break the mould and embed the theme of young love within the Chinese context’.[1] Tian decided to adapt the Shakespearean work while visiting Stratford-upon-Avon last year: ‘If Shakespeare was alive today … I hope he would be delighted to see a Chinese love story this year.’[2] […continued]
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