Shakespeare in Asia: Contemporary Performance

Abstract

s edited volume of essays, Shakespeare in Asia: Contemporary Performance, brings together highly informative and divergent readings of Shakespearean productions from different parts of Asia. In a concise "Introduction" to the volume, Kennedy and Lan not only contextualize the arrival of Shakespeare in China, Japan, and India, but also explain the challenges of "intercultural" revisions which the plays undergo in the continent. Unlike a series of studies of Shakespeare in the Asian context, especially in the field of Postcolonial studies, which tend to homogenize the "East, " Kennedy and Lan lucidly articulate that it is challenging to define the term "Asia , " and therefore the volume does not attempt to capture an essential Asian Shakespeare but explores diverse productions and approaches to performing Shakespeare in Asia.Part 1, "Voice and Body, " appropriately begins with issues related to the tradition of performance practices in India, Japan, and China respectively. John Russell Brown explores the possibility of performing Shakespearean drama in relation to the rules outlined in the Indian text Natyashastra. Daniel Gallimore's essay, while explaining how several contemporary productions are an extension of the existing traditions of Japanese theatre, provides an excellent analysis of the ways in which Japanese translations manipulate prosody to capture the essence of Shakespearean verse. The challenges of "intercultural" productions are taken a step further by Fei Chunfang and Sun Huizhu, who persuasively argue that internationally successful adaptations by Beijing Opera cannot be pigeonholed as examples of colonial/postcolonial power relationships.In part 2, which deals with popular cultures, Richard Burt analyzes the unexplored area of what he calls the "Shakespeare-play-within-the-film genre. " He uses the genre to argue that the representations of Shakespeare in Indian cinema undermine the distinction between "Bollywood film as low and Shakespeare as high" (80). Burt's excellent model of investigation can be further developed not only by problematizing the term "Bollywood, " but also by using more examples of references to Shakespearean drama in several other mainstream Hindi films. Using Douglas Lanier's significant concept of the capacity of the "radical mobility" (110) of Shakespearean films, Minami