All the world's a stage

Tian Qinxin's staging of Romeo and Juliet keeps the fire burning between the star-crossed lovers, but preserves only the most important lines from the original text. CHAI MEILIN/CHINA DAILY

The first production of Shakespeare in China was staged in 1902, when, in an effort to better understand English history and language, students at Shanghai St. John College put on The Merchant of Venice - in the original language.

The story of Antonio, Portia and Shylock also produced the most popular Chinese-language dramatizations in the early years of the 20th century, when some 20 plays saw the light of day in the Middle Kingdom. But they were Shakespearean stories, based on the Lamb's version, rather than Shakespeare's own plays. Very often, actors were only given the plot, but no dialogue. They were supposed to improvise. So, "Hath not a Jew eyes?" or "The quality of mercy" might well have never been heard on a Chinese stage at the time.

The emphasis on narrative had an unintended benefit: It often brought out the contemporary relevance of the stories and helped strike a chord with the audiences of the day. A 1916 production of Macbeth, re-titled The Usurper, was a not-so-subtle swipe at the President-turned-Emperor Yuan Shikai. The actor Gu Wuwei was arrested on the grounds of inciting unrest and rebellion and was sentenced to death. But a happy ending came for the actor in a perfect deus ex machina when Yuan died suddenly and his regime fell.

The first professional Chinese production based on Shakespeare's own text, albeit in translation, took place in 1930. Again, it was The Merchant of Venice. Painted backdrops depicted Italian scenes and the actors wore Western costume. According to the scholars Ruru Li and David Jiang, as of 1994, about 95 percent of Shakespearean productions in China adhere to this style, which was considered authentic.

Different realities

The spoken play, as we know it, is an import from the West. Shakespeare's appearance on the Chinese stage coincided with the introduction of this new art form. As this modern, Western form of theater searched for maturity in urban China, traditional Chinese theater, made up of hundreds of dialect-based operas, took to Shakespearean material almost without a glitch. The larger-than-life characters, the long monologues and the dramatic twists all found a perfect home in China's existing theatrical traditions. As a matter of fact, Hamlet was turned into a Sichuan Opera piece long before the first "authentic" translated play was presented.

The Chinese reincarnations are often cited as testimony of the Bard's penetration into a different culture. But the reality may be different. Very often, adapting Shakespeare (and other Western sources) is a means of attracting a younger audience. The Taiwan-based actor Hsing-kuo Wu was blunt when he transformed Macbeth into The Kingdom of Desire, a Peking Opera: "By using a foreign play, the company would have a somewhat-neutral text on which it could write its own prescription for the future."

The implicit problem with this approach is over-simplification of the characters. Because Chinese operas are essentially morality dramas with black-and-white portrayals, the adaptors have to sacrifice Shakespeare's richness in portrayal and opt for a cut-and-dried interpretation. When a Shanghai-based opera troupe was commissioned to re-imagine a production of Hamlet in 2005, for the Danish castle where the original story is set, everything had to be trimmed from the original text, and only the element of revenge was preserved. "Hamlet is very complicated, and mine is like an elementary student's version," admitted Feng Gang, the playwright who adapted the story.

Not only are the stories transplanted to China and the names Sinicized, but sometimes even the ending is changed as a mark of respect for the conventions of the particular theatrical form taking on the Bard. A 1994 Yueju opera version of Hamlet dispensed with the tragedy and had the Danish prince rescue his country from his corrupt uncle. Yueju appeals mostly to housewives, so a stage littered with dead bodies was simply out of the question.