Staging History plays in BJ & translation project
Britain's Royal Shakespeare Company is calling on talented poet-translators to help re-awaken love for the Bard of Stratford in China after completing a run through Shakespeare's history plays "Henry the Fourth" and "Henry the Fifth" at Beijing's National Center for the Performing Arts.
Chinese actors pair up with their counterparts from the RSC to practice dialogues from Shakespeare's comedy "Twelfth Night." One reads the lines of a character in English, the other says them in Chinese. Then it is the turn of the other pair to reply with their character. Laughter ensues as the exercise unfolds.
The workshop was led by RSC Artistic Director Gregory Doran. The company has just concluded the Beijing leg of their Shakespearean trilogy comprising "Henry the Fourth Part I," "Henry the Fourth Part II," and "Henry the Fifth."
These are among Shakespeare's history plays and culminate with the Battle of Agincourt, which took place on French soil in 1415.
Directed by Doran, the China tour features Olivier-Award-winning actor Antony Sher as the larger-than-life alcoholic rascal, Falstaff. But the RSC's mission does not end with the closing performance.
"I think what we are very keen for the Royal Shakespeare Company to do was not just to come and do a tour in China and then go home again. We wanted to see if there was a really deep way of us collaborating," said Gregory Doran, Artistic Director of Royal Shakespeare Company, UK.
The workshop is one effort among many to forge connections with Chinese theater.
"Shakespeare is a universal writer. He's done in very different ways all across the world. We are certainly not in the business of telling the Chinese how to do Shakespeare," said Doran.
"What we wanted is to share some of our approaches to acting Shakespeare, speaking the text, and perhaps helping to develop new translations of Shakespeare by embedding translators in our rehearsals in Stratford-upon-Avon."
The company has also launched a translation project for the entire Shakespeare canon, as project manager Weng Shihui explains.
"The Shakespeare Folio Translation Project is a decade-long endeavor of RSC to translate theatrically viable, actor-friendly, and audience-accessible translation of Shakespeare's plays," Weng said.
"So we would like to use a very special way of working with Chinese theater-makers and translators by embedding them in our rehearsal room in Stratford-upon-Avon.
"By embedding them in our rehearsal process, they would have, hopefully, a better understanding of how modern British directors work with Shakespeare's text, how contemporary British actors understand and analyze the clues that Shakespeare has put into the text."
The Royal Shakespeare Company is calling for talented translators to join the project by sending their work to foliotranslation@rsc.org.uk before April 3. Details can be found on their official website.
After Beijing, the company will tour to Shanghai and Hong Kong.
