ABSTRACT
The 2014 NCPA programme is instructive, providing an insight into a changing appreciation of Shakespeare’s resonance, global and local, in contemporary Chinese culture. Alongside the National Theatre of Scotland’s collaboration with the Royal Shakespeare Company, Dunsinane, written by David Grieg (2010), a sequel to Macbeth (a co-production with its own reconfigured place-related cultural and political meaning in a year when a referendum on Scottish independence was taking place in the UK), a Tim Robbin-directed A Midsummer Night’s Dream from Los Angeles, an in-house production of Verdi’s operatic interpretation of Othello, a Chinese-Japanese co-production of Macbeth, a physical theatre production of Romeo and Juliet by experimental Lecoq-influenced Beijing company SanTuoQi, Lin Zhaohua and Yi Liming’s Coriolanus, a Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre reworking of The Taming of the Shrew relocated to 1930s Shanghai, and
another Dream, this time Dominic Dromgoole’s Original Practices production from the Globe Theatre, London, featured. Many of these productions were not new commissions as such but specific revivals intended to speak to the 450th anniversary context. NCPA’s own publicity was explicit about the influence it had taken from Dromgoole’s 2012 Globe to Globe festival when 37 Shakespeare plays were staged in 37 languages as part of the London Cultural Olympiad.2 The theatre also sponsored a world theatre forum as part of the year’s events emphasising its desire to engage in a global academic debate about the Shakespeare brand as well as about performance studies more generally.
