ABSTRACT
For centuries, Shakespeare has been re-played “without his language”2 but with loaded vocabularies of a wide array of settings and contexts around the world-proscenium stage, festival, open-air venue, gangster culture in Bombay, postwar London, and even ‘in the bush.’ Cultural anthropologist Laura Bohannan’s account of the African tribe Tiv’s insistence on reading Hamlet locally, along with her own ethnographic impulse, is only one of the more famous cases.3 In an era when readers and texts travel far and wide and when theatre works are often sponsored by multinational organizations and toured to multiple countries, how are artists rethinking the meaning of the local? What does a local interpretation of Shakespeare entail when the production is designed for a communal audience? How do theatre artists and audiences interact with familiar or unfamiliar local cultures embedded within performances in relation to what is often presented as universal truth in Shakespeare’s plays? A wide spectrum of answers have recently been proposed. Here I would like to explore Shakespeare performance in the liminal space constructed by dialect-speaking artists working in a provincial marketplace in rural China and urban Taiwan.4 Though in some instances ‘provincial’ can carry a pejorative charge of narrow mindedness or lacking the polish of urban culture, it is used here neutrally to signal a conscious move to carve a market that thrives on communal rather than international audiences in such a way that the conventionalized terms such as the local and the global cannot adequately capture.
