Negotiating New Terrains: Yellow Earth Theatre's Lear's Daughters and King Lear

Abstract

This article discusses two productions, Lear's Daughters (2003) and King Lear (2006), both by the London-based Yellow Earth Theatre (YET). YET has become known for its innovative use of media as well as creative fusion of different cultural elements. The author first considers how, in Lear's Daughters, director David Ka-Shing Tse created extra-textual layers that helped to forge links between the story of Lear and British Chinese communities. Narrating stories about Lear's three daughters from an unconventional perspective, YET's production explored issues of intergenerational miscommunication and domestic conflicts in a patriarchal family. In this way, Tse created new dimensions that highlighted the contemporary relevance of this 1980s feminist play. The second part of this article focuses on King Lear, YET's first Shakespeare production premiered in China. Set in a cosmopolitan Shanghai in 2020, this bilingual production showcased a wide array of cultural references from diverse sources, signifying the competing forces that underline China's current social changes. Specifically, the author focuses on an important aspect in YET's new adaptation – namely, the transformation of the story from the division of a political kingdom to the disintegration of a modern business empire. There was therefore an effort to downplay the political connotations associated with the original play, which consequentially helped to allow the resettling of this seventeenth-century tragedy in the context of contemporary China in the form of a story about domestic struggles and corporate wars.

Notes

1. Some of the company had met or worked together in West End productions such as M. Butterfly (1989, dir. John Dexter, Leicester Haymarket then Shaftesbury Theatre, London) and Miss Saigon (1989, dir. Nicholas Hytner, Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, London), as well as a fringe revival of Middleton and Rowley's The Changeling (1991, dir. Mark Rylance, Finborough Theatre, London). Some of them also collaborated with Mu-lan Theatre, another London-based British East Asian company, now disbanded.

2. YET company brochure (2001).

3. The festival initially ran 2001–05, and then after a three-year break, Typhoon 5 was held in November 2008, also at the Soho Theatre.

4. The Pearl Awards were founded by William Ong, founder and publisher of the Manchester-based magazine Chinatown, the first magazine devoted to Chinese communities in Britain. Words are cited from the announcement of the award http://www.dimsum.co.uk/community/the-pearl-awards.html[accessed 14 June 2009].

5. Information in this paragraph is taken from my interview with Tse on 24 May 2007.

6. Alexander C. Y. Huang, ‘King Lear’ (Review), Theatre Journal, 59.3 (2006), 494–95 (p. 494).

7. For more on deterritorialisation and YET's work, see Lia Wen-Ching Liang, ‘Assembling Differences: Towards a Deleuzian Approach to Intercultural Theatre’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of London, 2009).

8. Helen Gilbert and Jacqueline Lo, Performance and Cosmopolitics: Cross-cultural Transactions in Australasia (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 8.

9. Jonathan Gibbs, ‘Review of Lear's Daughters’, Time Out, 12 November 2003, p. 145.

10. The text was first published in Herstory: Volume I, ed. by Gabriele Griffin and Elaine Aston (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1991).

11. Lizbeth Goodman, ‘Women's Alternative Shakespeares and Women's Alternatives to Shakespeare in Contemporary British Theatre’, in Cross-cultural Performances, ed. by Marianne Novy (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993), pp. 206–26 (p. 220). For this production's innovative reworking of Shakespeare's play and contribution to British theatre in the 1980s, see, for example, Susan Bennett, Performing Nostalgia: Shifting Shakespeare and the Contemporary Past (London and New York: Routledge, 1996) pp. 39–78.

17. ‘Director's note’, Lear's Daughters programme.

12. Griffin and Aston, Herstory, p. 13.

13. Gibbs, ‘Review’.

14. Michael Billington, ‘Lear's Daughters’, Guardian, 20 November 2003, p. 30.

15. ‘Director's note’, Lear's Daughters programme.

16. Lizbeth Goodman, ‘Lear's Daughters on Stage and in Multimedia and Fiona Shaw's King Lear Workshops as Case Studies in Breaking the Frame’, in Languages of Theatre Shaped by Women, ed. by Lizbeth Goodman and Jane de Gay (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2003), pp. 37–47 (p. 46).

18. Quoted in David Parker and Miri Song, ‘Inclusion, Participation and the Emergence of British Chinese Websites’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 33.7 (2007), 1043–61 (p. 1048).

19. For relevant studies, see David Parker, Through Different Eyes: The Cultural Identities of Young Chinese People in Britain (Sydney: Avebury, 1995).

20. The documentary was shot during YET's outreach workshops held in Ming Tak Chinese School in Sutton.

21. This set of installations was created by Kazuko Hohki.

22. Lear's Daughters, p. 217. All references are to the version of the play published in Adaptations of Shakespeare: A Critical Anthology of Plays from the Seventeenth Century to the Present, ed. by Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 217–32.

23. Ibid., p. 218. All three women (Kwai Lau, Queelan Foo-Kune, and Kazuko Hohki) are practising artists. Lau and Foo-Kune also appeared as themselves, as the painter and the sculptor, in the set of video installations by Hohki.

24. Interview, 22 March 2004. By ‘old value’, Tse referred, in general, to Confucian values that were acquired through early family life and education, such as obeying the elderly in a display of filial piety.

25. In this regard, see also the findings in a recent report by the Chinese Community Centre, Chinese People in the UK: Meeting Community Needs (London: Chinese Community Centre, 2005).

26. The production toured to Nottingham, Guildford, Wolverhampton and Liverpool before London.

27. Interview with Tse, 24 May 2007. All quotations from interview in this section are taken from this session.

28. Programme notes.

29. Half of the cast members were native English-speakers while the other half mainly spoke Mandarin Chinese. The bilingual feature became a major source of complaints for some reviewers. See, for instance, Huang's reviews in Shakespeare, 3.2 (August 2007), 239–42, and in Theatre Journal 59.3 (2006), 494–95, and Claire Conceison, ‘Huang Zuolin Festival’ (Review), Theatre Journal, 59.3 (2006), 491–93. At the same time, the style of the Chinese translation of Lear– a version that was translated by Zhu Shenghao in 1943 and was popular in China – was criticised by Conceison (p. 492) for its ‘jarring contrast to the poetic English version’.

30. Interview with Tse, 24 May 2007.

31. Programme notes.

32. Nevertheless, while the conversations onstage flowed well in two languages, according to Tse, the early stages of rehearsal were a challenge for all involved. The rehearsal script was printed bilingually, but a translator was needed initially to cope with the language barriers.

33. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).

34. Interview with Tse, 24 May 2007. Tse especially chose to create a Jean-Paul Gaultier style in order to epitomise the richness of the family.

36. Interview with Tse, 24 May 2007.

35. The small cast resulted in the cutting of minor scenes and characters, and the doubling of cast members. For example, in the opening scene Cordelia's suitors, Albany and Cornwall, were cut. Only later did audiences learn that Albany and Cornwall were doubled by actors who played, respectively, Gloucester and Edgar. In addition, Nina Kwok, who played Cordelia, also doubled as Oswald.

37. Daphne Pi-Wei Lei, Operatic China: Staging Chinese Identity Across the Pacific (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 22.

38. Gilbert and Lo, Performance and Cosmopolitics, p. 8, original emphasis.

39. Terence Hawkes, Meaning by Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1992), p.121.

40. William Dodd, ‘Impossible Worlds: What Happens in King Lear, Act 1, Scene 1?’Shakespeare Quarterly, 50.4 (1999), 477–507 (p. 481).

41. Dan Brayton, ‘Angling in the Lake of Darkness: Possession, Dispossession, and the Politics of Discovery in King Lear’, ELH, 70 (2003), 399–426 (p. 400).

42. Rossella Ferrari, ‘Transnation/transmedia/transtext: Border-crossing from Screen to Stage in Greater China’, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, 2.1 (2008), 52–65 (p. 61).

43. A case in point is the Anti-Secession Law of China, which was ratified on 14 March 2005. The law formalised China's policy that ‘non-peaceful means’ could be taken against Taiwan independence. For the significance of this law, see, for instance, Keyuan Zou, ‘Governing the Taiwan Issue in Accordance with Law: An Essay on China's Anti-Secession Law’, Chinese Journal of International Law, 4 (2005), 455–63.

44. Regarding the tight control exerted on media, literary works and performance arts in contemporary People's Republic of China, see, among others, Eugene Perry Link, The Uses of Literature: Life in the Socialist Chinese Literary System (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).