Worlds Elsewhere (77 page)

So perhaps the globalisation theorists had it right, that Shakespeare was a multinational brand, a free-floating symbol that transcended national borders and could attach itself to many different kinds of cultural artefacts. If so, the process had begun even within his lifetime – if not off the coast of Sierra Leone on board an East India Company ship, then at city fairs and princely courts in German-speaking northern Europe. The translated and abbreviated Shakespeare performed by the English Comedians early in the seventeenth century was barely recognisable, just as the heavily adapted Shakespeare so crazily popular in nineteenth-century Britain and America would now be regarded with horror in both those places. The inescapable fact was that, for most of the last four centuries, ‘Shakespeare' was a concept at best hazily related to the playscripts the man himself had written. But this, in a sense, was the point. Ben Jonson's famous obsequy in the 1623 First Folio, that his dead colleague was ‘not of an age, but for all time', contained the grains of a potent idea – that one secret of Shakespeare's global success is that he is endlessly variable, reinterpretable, translatable, can never be pinned down to exactly one thing.

Yet there was another crucial fact, one I'd discovered reading up on Sierra Leone and had been reminded of in South Africa: that, searching for Shakespeare in many different cultures, one saw his silhouette everywhere, even places he'd never been. Many societies, particularly in the economically poor global south, rubbed along perfectly fine without the works of William Shakespeare, and would continue to do so long into the future. The anthropologist Laura Bohannan's parable
about
Hamlet
and the Tiv, in which the most famous play by the world's most famous author failed to impress a group of Nigerian tribal elders, was an essential caution. Not only did it relegate Shakespeare to the status of just one storyteller among many, but it reminded us (reminded
me
) that some things were stubbornly and unavoidably local. This, too, was something I had only dimly grasped before I began to travel. It was a valuable lesson.

Back in Hong Kong, it was becoming dusk. The apartment blocks and skyscrapers had become speckled with warm points of light and the sky, murky and sullen, had deepened to purplish-grey. The Bank of China tower was illuminated with sharp bars of electric white, broken into crooked reflections by the mirrored glass. Next to it reared the crest of the International Finance Centre, its summit swallowed by the gathering murk. A storm looked to be on the way. For a few minutes, as it stole soundlessly in, I watched the illuminated city meet its twin on the blackening water.

Looking back through my notes, I snorted at where they'd led me: to the image of Shakespeare as an untethered symbol of trans-national, free-flowing capital. Where else would one find a Shakespeare who looked like that, but right here in Hong Kong?

That was another strange thing about Shakespeare: he had a disconcerting habit of reflecting your own self back at you.

At the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the foyer was a medley of Shakespearian characters. Using the programme I'd been issued, I attempted to identify them: the girl with the belly padding and the appliqué moustache had to be Sir Toby Belch. The boy wearing streaky dark face-paint must be Othello, but was he the Othello from the University of Macau, Renmin University or Ludong University? How about the three students in Chinese-opera costume and full make-up? Anyone's guess. The characters wafted around, freezing robotically into pose as selfies were captured and filed, and forming ever more unlikely Shakespearian couplings: Juliet with her arm around Imogen; Prospero cosying up to Macbeth. The Nurse had clearly taken a shine to Othello.

It seemed a good way to spend the penultimate day of my trip, and only partly because this free-associating parade of Shakespearian characters resembled the mangled state of my brain. The Chinese
Universities Shakespeare Festival was the largest and longest-running event of its kind in China. Over the ten years of its existence, hundreds of students had taken part, from 92 universities in 27 provinces. Theoretically it was all about cooperation, but no one was fooled. In the best Chinese traditions it was ferociously competitive: 44 universities had applied this year, only 12 making it to the finals. Students had been rehearsing for months, had taken days off class and all-night coach journeys to get here.

Despite the smiles and the selfies, the atmosphere was jittery. Professors were huddled in corners, with the hunched air of professional sports coaches. There was much trading of tips: would it be CUHK's year, or was being the home team a handicap? Might Nanjing regain the glory days of its past?

After a few minutes' speechifying and applause, we were introduced to the judging panel: the former head of the Australian National University drama department, the artistic director of Shakespeare Western Australia and the dramaturg at the California Shakespeare theatre. A strange coincidence, re-encountering Cal Shakes: it was where I'd watched
Hamlet
many months before. It seemed peculiar after everything I'd learned about colonial history that the students were Chinese and the judges white, but I kept the thought to myself.

The head of the CUHK English department said something about art being a bridge to our shared world. There was warm applause. Global Shakespeare in action. More warm applause. The sponsor, an oleaginous businessman who had taken a gallant interest in the female students, tapped the microphone. ‘There is a saying in Chinese, it takes ten years to plant a tree …' I doubted it, but it was a noble thought.

As the teams streamed backstage to take their places, the head of department gave me a lowdown on the rules. Each team would perform a handful of scenes from the play of their choice, not exceeding twenty minutes. Only three actors were allowed per team. The scripts had been edited, but all were in Shakespearian English. This was as much a test of comprehension and diction as it was of acting.

I said I found it an odd idea, Shakespeare being used competitively, like college football.

The head's eyes were on his phone, searching for the festival's Twitter hashtag. ‘That's China for you. Survival of the fittest. Work here for long enough and you don't notice it.'

First out of the blocks were CUHK, with an all-female cast tackling
early scenes from
Romeo and Juliet:
the tussle between Juliet and her mother over plans for Juliet's arranged marriage, followed by a silent tableau of the ball scene. It was a well-mannered performance that put me in mind of Disney's
Cinderella.
Juliet wore a ball dress and pouted like Alicia Silverstone in
Clueless
; Lady Capulet was nicely haughty, with an excellent line in eye-rolling at her teenage daughter's capricious recalcitrance. Romeo was nowhere to be seen, invoked only by name: a nicely feminist take on a play somewhat over-stuffed with brawling young men.

Trying to get into the judging spirit, I looked for demerits – their pronunciation was pitch-perfect, to be sure, but was there more than a hint of finishing school? All were Hongkongers, but one would have had a hard time telling it; with their American high-school vowels and their prom-queen sheen, there seemed nothing remotely Chinese in what they were doing. But maybe that was a western way of looking at it. Maybe it was authentically Hong Kong to pretend you weren't from Hong Kong.

The letter scene from
Twelfth Night,
performed by Tsinghua University, was more enjoyable. Setting the play in the early-twentieth-century Republic of China, the student director and creative team had gone in for vaguely P. G. Wodehouse-ish outfits, with the striking exception of Malvolio, clad in gown and tights of a vibrant yellow hue (traditionally indicating high office as well as the colour of lust, it was explained afterwards). The tights were deployed repeatedly and with great vigour, which generated much audience excitement – at least more than Shakespeare's wordplay, which (unwisely, I thought) had mostly been retained. It was the first time I'd ever heard Malvolio's normally reliable line, ‘these be her very c's, her u's, and her t's' – exclaiming at what he believes to be Olivia's handwriting – fall flat. I glanced at the ninth-grader next to me: not a titter. Cunt jokes presumably worked better in Cantonese.

Macau University's
Othello
came and went. My mind wasn't entirely on the task in hand. The storm had eventually blown in the night before, and I had been woken at 3.30 a.m. by a window-rattling crash so violent I thought at first it was a car bomb in the street. Disorientated, heart thudding, I had lain there for what felt like minutes, looking at the pale glare of the streetlights on the ceiling and trying to remember which country I was in. China? India? I had eventually concluded it was Taiwan. As I fell asleep, an image had swum into my head of London
painfully clear and sharp: drizzle, cloud, the soft smell of charcoal smoke over Victorian back-to-backs, the green shimmer of trees in the park …

I sat up in my seat and tried to keep hold of the present. Xiamen University of Technology had taken the stage. They were regarded as a long shot, coming from a new-ish university in Fujian province whose strengths lay in engineering and science rather than the liberal arts. They were underdogs. I decided to root for them.

I needn't have bothered; their version of
Cymbeline
was by far the best performance, thoughtful and emotional, portraying two pivotal scenes – Posthumus's banishment and separation from Imogen, followed by the grimly insinuating dialogue in which the dastardly Giacomo implies that Posthumus has been unfaithful to his wife while away. Their English was precise and believable, expertly navigating the whirlpools and eddies of late-Shakespearian verse, but the action had been directed in the style of Chinese opera. The cast were garbed in white facepaint and silken gowns the colour of icing; there was much coy fluttering of fans. I had no idea how authentic this
jingju
was, but for once that didn't seem the point. The production captured the play's fragile beauty and poise, how so much of its language was about the way things were seen, or not seen:

Imogen was here describing a leave-taking she had not, in reality, been permitted to observe: Posthumus was long gone, the lovers already separated, and would not be reunited for nearly the duration of the play.

Cymbeline
is one of the last scripts Shakespeare wrote on his own: the astrologer Simon Forman saw it in 1611, which places it alongside
The Winter's Tale
and
The Tempest.
Deeply influenced by the Stuart masques its author must have witnessed at court, the play suited translation into another courtly form, Chinese opera. Imogen's speech had a haunting, evanescent beauty that matched the elegance and composure of
jingju,
its balance between constrained poetic formality and something much more pregnant with meaning.

Though the word is now unfashionable,
Cymbeline
is sometimes still called a ‘romance', and of all the late plays it most deserves the term. It is a narrative of quest, or quests: Cymbeline's journey towards becoming a better father, Posthumus's limping progress towards self-knowledge, Imogen's odyssey to find her brothers, through what looks very much like death – she drinks a sleeping draught and falls into a deathlike slumber – and then into mythic rebirth. Xiamen's director, a tutor going under the equally romantic name of Ballet Liu, had wisely made this abbreviated version more or less Imogen's drama, dominated by an intense central performance from a student called Zhang Peipei.

As Zhang took her bow, I realised with a start that behind her trembling fan real tears were in her eyes. They weren't far from mine.

In the raucous rush of a wood-panelled French wine bar, surrounded by braying Brits and Aussies, I spent a final evening in Hong Kong. It was a Tuesday evening, but felt later in the week. The suits and shirtsleeves were spilling outside; through the open windows the sound of the city was loud. Competing with the yowling sirens and the squealing of brakes were the low roar of air-conditioning units and the strident, angular intonations of Cantonese businessmen gossiping on the street. In the humid, dog's-breath air, the city itself felt like a living creature, one possessed of its own jittery, jumped-up energy.

I realised there was another reason I'd found
Cymbeline
so unexpectedly poignant that afternoon. I had seen the play at the Blackfriars in Staunton, Virginia, eighteen months before, near the beginning of my journeys.
Cymbeline
had also been the play read by Solomon Plaatje while he was romancing his wife, and it was a
Cymbeline
in Vadodara in 1880 that had convinced a previous traveller, Harold Littledale, of the strange beauties of Indian theatre. He, too, had been bowled over by Imogen (played, as she would have been in Shakespeare's day, by a male actor). Head deep in Chinese Shakespeares, I'd wiped these rival
Cymbelines
from my brain.

Were they rivals? The two productions I'd seen in the theatre couldn't have been more different. The Staunton
Cymbeline
was melodramatic, a rollicking tale with a loud twang of the American
frontier, acted in a theatre Shakespeare would have recognised the moment he stepped inside. Here in Hong Kong the play seemed much more delicate, performed in a cultural context that would have left its author bemused, but which contained an aristocratic grace he might perhaps have understood. The famous thing about
Cymbeline,
of course, was that it was an incomprehensible mishmash: Dr Johnson called its plot ‘unresisting imbecility'. An amalgam of sources from a typically eclectic variety of places – Holinshed's
Chronicles,
Boccaccio's
Decameron
in a version translated via Dutch, Elizabethan prose romances and a number of others – it was a melting pot. It was also a compendium of motifs from two and a half decades of writing and the final play to be printed in the First Folio. That the
Cymbelines
I'd seen were both the same play and utterly different, a world away from each other and not, seemed entirely appropriate.