Shakespeare and Chinese Performance at the Folger Shakespeare Library

The Folger Shakespeare Library’s recent exhibition, “Imagining China: The View from Europe, 1550–1700” (September 18, 2009—January 9, 2010), offered a fascinating glimpse into the history of intercultural exchanges. Curated by Timothy Billings with an interactive touchscreen video installation by Alexander C. Y. Huang, the exhibition usefully underscored the profound distance between sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury views of China and those most prevalent today. Viewers learned, for instance, that China was known in Shakespeare’s day not for porcelain but for musk deer, and that Europeans made an effort to learn the Chinese language, rather than the reverse. By portraying early modern Europe as foreign and unfamiliar, the exhibition destabilized modern racist assumptions that posit the centrality of the West and the naturalness of its cultural beliefs. The exhibition also successfully undermined the popular notion that globalization is a recent phenomenon. A chronological table incorporated into the video kiosk taught viewers that the first documented performance of Shakespeare in Asia took place in 1619, when employees of the Dutch East Indies Company staged a version of Hamlet in Indonesia. Another display case featured rare editions of The Orphan of China, Voltaire’s 1755 adaptation of a Chinese play that was later revived in English for David Garrick at Drury Lane.

Most relevant for readers of Shakespeare Bulletin, however, are the exhibition’s contributions to understandings of modern performance. The video installation of excerpts from recent Sinophone stage and film productions of Shakespeare’s plays offered a number of useful interventions in common narratives about cultural difference. (Those who missed the exhibition can view some of these amazing performances at Shakespeare Performance in Asia, http://web.mit.edu/shakespeare/asia/ , co-edited by Alexander C. Y. Huang and Peter Donaldson.) By carefully juxtaposing particular selections, Huang’s contributions to the Folger exhibition challenged essentialist ideas about Chinese and Western modes of dramatic representation and gently drew attention to spectators’ potential complicity in these discourses. Because the political and aesthetic implications of these performances can be seen most clearly in the clips from the comic film Chicken Rice War (2000), I will begin by discussing these excerpts in more detail, before moving on to show how similar concerns informed the other video selections.

Chicken Rice War revolves around a conflict between two Singapore- Chinese diaspora families whose teenage children land the title roles in an English-language production of Romeo and Juliet. When both sets of relatives attend the culminating performance, the ensuing scene evokes visions of Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle: hostilities between audience members, expressed loudly in Chinese during the show, finally come to a head when the star-crossed lovers kiss on stage. Mistaking fiction for reality, one family accuses the other of trying to steal their recipe for chicken rice by having daughter “Juliet” seduce son “Romeo.” The resulting fight brings the play to a standstill and is only resolved when the young male lead chastises his parents for their breach of decorum. That his speech takes place in English is significant. Literacy in the conventions of representational theatre is here imagined as essentially Western. The parents, unable to appreciate this dramatic mode, continually interrupt the performance event and eventually destroy the suspension of disbelief required for it to work.

Instead of acquiescing to such Eurocentric performance paradigms, however, other selections from Chicken Rice War undermined both their centrality and their validity. The film opens with the Chorus, here part of a frame narrative, holding a reporter’s microphone and speaking a witty revision of the Prologue to Shakespeare’s play. He is interrupted by an outraged woman, apparently his supervisor, who accuses him of being incomprehensible: “What are you saying?” she cries in Singaporean colloquial English. “Do you think Mr. Tan in Ang Mo Kio can understand you? When I told you not to speak in Singlish, I didn’t ask you to sound like Shakespeare! Do it again! Do it again!” Immediately thereafter, the film cuts to a woman in modern dress giving more of the back...