Re-playing Shakespeare in Asia: (Routledge Studies in Shakespeare)

This book reviews the "playing" of Shakespeare in which there is a re-staging and a re-writing -- through adaptation, appropriation, or acculturation -- of the Western Shakespeare into the gestural, symbolic, stylized, or ritualized worlds of Asian theatre languages. It examines this interface in aesthetic, theatrical, cultural and political terms, looking at key issues in intercultural performance, how it re-configures the text, genre and gender and how it can intervene in the shaping of ethnicity, identity and postcoloniality. Contributors examine how differing cultures negotiate such encounters, and the implications of this worldwide re-playing for Shakespeare’s theatre. Focusing specifically on the work of major directors in the central and emerging areas of Asia -- Japan, China, India, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines -- the chapters show how performing Shakespeare in Asia not only revitalizes indigenous theatre forms, but generates an alternate cultural capital which is exploited in the global market.

Table of Contents:
List of Figures Acknowledgments Re-playing Shakespeare in Asia: An Introduction, Poonam Trivedi Part I: Re-playing Interculturality 1. Other Shakespeares in Asias: An Overview, James Brandon 2. Asian Theatres, Mnouchkine and Shakespeare: The Search for a Theatrical Form, Brian Singleton 3. Shakespeare and the Indian Image(nary) : Embod(y)ment in Versions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Poonam Trivedi 4. "What, has this thing appear’d again tonight?" : Re-playing Shakespeares on the Japanese Stage, Minami Ryuta Part II: Re-playing Textuality / Theatricality 5. Fooling with Lear: A Performance History of Suzuki Tadashi`s King Lear (1984-2006), Ian Curruthers 6. Six People in Search of "To be or not to be …": Hamlet’s Soliloquy in Six Chinese Productions and the Metamorphosis of Shakespeare Performance on the Chinese Stage, Ruru Li 7. Is This Shakespeare?: Inoue Hidenori’s Adaptations of Shakespeare, Yoshihara Yukari 8. From Proscenium to Paddy Fields: Utpal Dutt’s Shakespeare Jatra, Tapati Gupta Part III: Re-playing Ethnicity, Identity and Postcoloniality 9. And Never The Twain Shall Meet? Shakespeare and Philippine Performance Traditions, Judy Celine Ick 10. The Stages ‘Occupied by Shakespeare’: Intercultural Performances and the Search for ‘Koreanness’ in Post-colonial Korea, Kim Moran 11. Shakespeare in the Shadows: Cultural Alienation, Politics and Eddin Khoo’s Shadow Puppet Adaptation of Macbeth, Nurul Farhana Low Abdullah and C. S. Lim 12. The Peripheral Body of Empire: Shakespearean Adaptations and Taiwan’s Geopolitics, Peichen Wu 13. "No World without Verona Walls"? Shakespeare in the Provincial Cultural Marketplace, Alexander Huang Part IV: Re-playing Genre and Gender 14. Dancing to Shakespeare: Crossing Genre and Gender in the Tragedies, Paromita Chakravarti and Swati Ganguly 15. "Living in a Different House": A Gambuh Macbeth in Bali, John Emigh 16. "O Heavy Lightness, O Serious Vanity": Camping Romeo and Juliet in Postcolonial Taiwan, Bi-qi Beatrice Lei List of Contributors Index

About the Author :
Poonam Trivedi is Reader in English at the University of Delhi, India. Ryuta Minami is Professor of English at Aichi University of Education, Japan.

Review :
"This rich and thought-provoking collection is a welcome and timely addition to recent studies focussing on Shakespeare in Asia and charting, more generally, what Trivedi aptly describes as a 'surge of creativity in Asian theatre'." - Sonia Massai, Theatre Research International