Culture

Shakespeare, with an improvised twist

By Christine Laskowski (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-03-22 08:09

Shakespeare is the inspiration for the actors' improvisation in the Beijing troupe Shakespeare Revelries. Zou Hong / China Daily

Shakespeare Revelries, a Beijing actors group, improvises the world's most famous plays

As if performing Shakespeare were not difficult on its own, the Beijing actors group, Shakespeare Revelries, has decided to take the canon of probably the world's most famous playwright one step further - and improvise it.

This very international, ten person strong troupe has taken scenes from 26 of Shakespeare's plays and rigorously set out to familiarize themselves with the text and the characters so that a single word or subject can trigger the appearance of a scene from an entirely different play.

Meaning that when a scene from the Comedy of Errors ends on the theme of love, it canmorph into a scene between Romeo and Mercutio from Romeo and Juliet, or a humorous soliloquy from Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing.

For Shakespeare Revelries producer Stephanie Azulos, inspired interruption and spontaneous variation are the rewards.

"There's potential for everything to go so many ways," she said. "Which means every night is going to be different."

To be able to improvise Shakespeare requires an extensive and thorough knowledge of the text so that it becomes second nature, a formidable task for any thespian.

Director Ian Reed's approach was to cast actors already very familiar with Shakespeare's work.

"Within the cast," Reed said, "there are people who know Shakespeare from every angle. I looked for people who have a good instinct for Shakespeare and Shakespeare's language and who can convey it very quickly," adding, "it's 90 percent homework and 10 percent rehearsal."

Rebecca Parr explained how even as an actress educated in England, she did not have the opportunity to perform Shakespeare until she came to Beijing. There was quite a bit to learn, she said.

"I never realized how important punctuation was," Parr explained. "Shakespeare's all about the punctuation. I finally learned to think of it in terms of thoughts, not simply words."

According to Daniel Cotterall, who owns his own company in Beijing and does acting as a hobby, "we're bringing a freshness to it. We've got murder scenes, rivalry, distrust, lust..."

"And deception, deceit and cross-dressing," chimed in actor Tony Monahan with a playful grin.

With props and wigs and skirts at their disposal, the actors have ample opportunity for gender-bending and slapstick, but their objective with this improvisation is not comedy alone - as the term improvisation often suggests - rather it mixes the comedy with tragedy and drama, in order to "go through all the modes of Shakespeare in a single evening," as Reed explained.

The idea behind Revelries came from Reed's time as an actor in New York when a workshop in which he participated celebrated Shakespeare's birthday by acting out the Shakespeare they already knew.

"The idea was Shakespeare had fallen asleep and in his dreams his characters returned to him. So when I came to Beijing I put together a theater company to do a stage production called Shakespeare Reveries, but changed the format of it. In our show we have Prospero (played by Reed) and Ariel (played by Ellen Orlando) from The Tempest summoning the spirits of Shakespeare's works to the stage and the show begins, ending with Prospero's line: 'Our revels now have ended.'"

Shakespeare Revelries spans two hours with an intermission, and with the help of Lavender Zhao, scenes will be accompanied by a PowerPoint presentation with Chinese translations based on rehearsed scenes.

For Reed, the principal behind such an endeavor is a simple one, and it is exactly what makes Shakespeare just as relevant in Beijing today as it did during his lifetime.

"No matter how many hundred of times we've said these lines before, it's as if we're saying them for the first time - inventing them as we go along and the characters are finding how to express what they need to say."