At the back of my mind was a book by the American critic C. L. Barber called Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy. Published in the late 1950s, when Jiao and his colleagues had been preparing the first version of their escapist Much Ado About Nothing, it argued that the concept of festive renewal lay at the heart of the comedies, connecting them with ancient folk rites and myths, medieval mumming plays and May games – images of good conquering evil at the most basic, primal level. Barber’s insistence on the healing power of happy endings had been dismissed as sentimental hogwash by younger critics, brought up in a more cynical era, but I thought the idea had real resonance here. Comedy equals tragedy plus time; by acting happily-ever-after, perhaps you could make it real.
Jiao lit yet another cigarette, his tenth in forty-five minutes. Through the smoke he looked impregnable, mysterious.
‘Life has a lot of hardships, difficulties, but this is actually very important for an actor. These experiences should accumulate in your heart. Intellectuals in Britain are more innocent. They may not have accumulated such suffering and hardship as their Chinese counterparts have.’
It was hard to disagree, I said.
TWO DAYS AND A SHORT PLANE TRIP LATER, I was sneaking into the back of a room at National Taiwan Normal University. All I could see was a scrum of photographers and hands with cameraphones attached to them waving high in the air. The room was hot and bright. In the background was pre-recorded Elizabethan lute music, though it was hard to tell over the yelling and the clattering of camera shutters.
On a dais at the front, a group of dignitaries was blinking in the TV lights. Behind them was a poster depicting a cartoonish skyline – a child’s compendium of global cities, the Eiffel Tower next to Tower Bridge next to a chunk of the Forbidden City. Romping across this interconnected global megalopolis, like a balding Godzilla, was a figure just about identifiable as William Shakespeare. The ruff was there, as was the goatee, but he looked distinctly Asian. Also, there were three of him. One was doing the V-for-victory sign like a Chinese teenager posing for a snapshot. Various people had told me during my odyssey that Shakespeare was taking over the world, but I had never yet seen the image rendered literally.
As the Q&A session got going, I crammed myself next to the Taipei Times and pulled out my notebook, wondering vaguely if an academic Shakespeare conference had ever before attracted a roomful of hacks. Almost certainly not. But it appeared the Asian Shakespeare Association had realised it was a story.
I’d first heard of the ASA in Delhi the previous year. Fed up with attending international conferences in Europe or America, a group of academics had banded together and decided to set up a pan-Asian society of their own. The ASA would be run by Asians, for Asians. Among the membership were scholars from India, Japan, the Philippines, Korea, Malaysia and Singapore, not to mention a sizeable team from Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau and the mainland. This was the ASA’s debut gathering.
While the Chinese journalists shouted questions, I scanned the programme – three full days of plenary papers, seminars, round tables, acting and events, featuring many big names from the global academic scene. There were sessions on Shakespearian acting and contemporary Asian politics, cross-cultural performativity, translation and adaptation, early-modern travel.
Arguably, though, the ASA mattered less for what it included than what it signified. Global Shakespeare was becoming a hot academic field, but – like most of academia – its power bases were overwhelmingly in the west. The best jobs, the resources, the funding, the journals: all were still in Europe and North America. Even within Asia, 30 per cent of the world’s land mass, scholars didn’t engage with each other. Locked in their specialist geographical areas, the Indians didn’t talk to the Japanese, or the Filipinos to the Koreans. The ASA would change all that, was the idea. The conference theme, somewhat pointedly, was ‘Shakespearian journeys’. In Shakespeare, as in global politics and economics, Asia was in the ascendant.
The microphone was handed to the flustered-looking Australian chair of the International Shakespeare Association, who promptly claimed that Shakespeare was born in London and worked in Stratford, which caused a minor diplomatic incident when it was relayed in Chinese.
He tried again, sweat visibly beading on his forehead. ‘The founding of the Asian Shakespeare Association proves enormous interest in and engagement of the people of Asia with Shakespeare.’ This time there was enthusiastic nodding.
I listened hard as the chair of the ASA, Bi-qi Lei, stepped forward to give her closing remarks in Mandarin. The only word I recognised was the name ‘Shashibiya’. Slim, with a cascade of black hair, she had the look of a petite praying mantis dressed by Armani. Unlike the Europeans, she looked in full control of the situation.
Taipei was a useful place to distil some of the thoughts I had collected in two years of intermittent travel. I spent a few hours in a session on Chinese Shakespeare, in which it transpired that my struggles to engage theatre directors in conversation about the Communist Party were far from unusual – not so much because anyone was frightened about retribution (though funding was certainly an issue), but more because politics was seen as a huge turn-off in the brave new China.
The Australian academic, Peter Holbrook, looking relieved to have escaped the Taiwanese press, talked engagingly about the idea of motion in Shakespeare’s texts – something that suffuses them at every level, from the deft bird imagery that gives the early narrative poem Venus and Adonis such energy and life (noted back in the 1930s by the British critic Caroline Spurgeon) to the expansive worlds of the late plays. Holbrook offered a gorgeous example from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where Oberon rhapsodises to Puck of a fantastical vision he has seen, ‘a mermaid on a dolphin’s back’
Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath
That the rude sea grew civil at her song
And certain stars shot madly from their spheres […]
That very time I saw, but thou couldst not,
Flying between the cold moon and the earth
Cupid, all armed. A certain aim he took
At a fair vestal thronèd by the west,
And loosed his love-shaft smartly from his bow
As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts.
But I might see young Cupid’s fiery shaft
Quenched in the chaste beams of the wat’ry moon,
And the imperial vot’ress passèd on,
In maiden meditation, fancy-free.
Oberon’s speech has attracted the interest of scholars because it draws on what may have been childhood memories of an entertainment Shakespeare had seen staged by the Earl of Leicester at Kenilworth near Stratford for Queen Elizabeth I, perhaps the ‘imperial vot’ress’ in question. But chiefly it is remarkable for the joyous speed of the writing, the liquid movement of its metaphors, its world-encompassing energy. Oberon’s speech is scarcely required by the plot, merely a preamble to his describing the location of the ‘herb’ that Puck will use to dose the lovers’ eyes. One feels almost that Shakespeare is letting his quill run away with him in sheer delight at what it could do. Hearing the words, Puck – no slowcoach – declares that he’ll ‘put a girdle round about the earth | In forty minutes’.
I wished I had Puck’s pace, not to mention his immunity to jet lag. But as I listened to the talk, I wondered if there was something here that touched on ideas I’d been carrying with me since I started my own journeys. Many of his contemporaries singled out Shakespeare’s quick-wittedness, the agile speed of his thought – the fact that he barely blotted a line, or as his colleagues Heminges and Condell put it in their preface to the First Folio, that ‘his mind and hand went together’. At the deepest of levels Shakespeare’s writing is bewitched by ideas of changefulness, mutation, shifting value, time’s whirligig, the flexibilities embodied in metaphor (the word itself comes from a Greek root meaning ‘carrying from one thing to another’). And if one were looking for an answer as to how one man wrote forty-plus plays, two long
narrative poems and a hundred and fifty-four sonnets in something like twenty-five years, quick-wittedness wasn’t a bad place to start.
Did this explain why his work had proved so agile and flexible, when it encountered other cultures? Not in itself. But the idea seemed compelling, if one could see the agility and flexibility encoded in their very substance.
I filed it for the moment alongside numerous other theories as to why Shakespeare had gone global, and made haste for the next seminar.
As so often, it was the conversations not on the official programme that were the ones to have. I picked up Hong Kong tips – mainly bar-related – from a young Northern Irish lecturer of Chinese heritage, useful for when I arrived there later in the week. I learned about the perils of teaching Shakespeare in Qatar, where salaries were dizzying (by academic standards) and the confluence of Renaissance studies and Islam suggestive, but one could be deported at any minute if it was declared one was in fact promulgating Christianity.
I had an informative chat with a senior academic from Nottingham, who had recently joined the university’s overseas campus at Ningbo near Shanghai. ‘Asia is where things are at!’ she declared, waving her Starbucks coffee. No doubt the Chinese travel agent I had spoken to in Nottingham would agree.
One lunchtime I sat down with an academic from Beijing, Li Jun (David, he preferred), who had given an absorbing paper on performances of Shakespeare on the mainland in marginal or politically charged contexts. One of his exhibits was a Romeo and Juliet staged in 2006 in Beijing for migrant labourers – the forgotten tribe of the economic miracle, sometimes referred to as China’s ‘untouchables’. It was from David that I learned a fact that stayed with me long after I left China: that in Super Girl and Super Boy, the Chinese equivalent of Pop Idol, 800 million SMS votes had been cast, the largest and freest popular vote in Chinese history.
These weren’t the only politics on campus. The previous evening there had been a screening of a film going under the name of Shakespeare tong tai (‘Shakespeare Must Die’). Despite its blood-and-thunder title, this wasn’t – mercifully – a historical thriller about Christopher Marlowe and the authorship controversy, but an adaptation of Macbeth, completed in 2012 by the Thai film-maker Ing Kanjanavanit.
Set in a sleek contemporary version of Bangkok, with Macbeth as a careerist military officer who becomes a populist political leader, the film was smoothly executed, but hadn’t seemed especially startling when I’d seen it, particularly compared to much more radical East Asian rewrites such as Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well, his salaryman Hamlet, or his 1957 Kumonosu-jō (Throne of Blood in English), which transformed the play into a brooding warrior epic. Almost the most unusual thing about Shakespeare Must Die was its prodigious length: unusually faithful to the First Folio text, 172 minutes long despite the relative brevity of the script, it gave Kenneth Branagh’s baggy 242-minute Hamlet – almost certainly the longest Shakespeare film ever made – a run for its money.
It wasn’t so much the movie that was interesting as what had happened after it had left the editing suite. Shakespeare Must Die had been banned. After a protracted saga lasting most of 2012, the Thai censors declared the film unfit for public consumption, on the grounds that it was ‘in conflict with peaceful social order’.
Ing K (her professional name) and Manit Sriwanichpoom, her producer and off-screen partner, cried foul, but to no avail. Adding to the farcical irony – not least of which was that a 407-year-old text had been deemed immoral – was the fact that Shakespeare Must Die had received 3 million baht (around £54,000) in funding from the Thai government. The same department that had helped pay for the film was now banning it.
It was a perplexing situation, one that touched on many of the issues I’d been asking about, largely fruitlessly, back on the mainland. The ASA had negotiated rights to screen Shakespeare Must Die, one of the few times it had ever been seen in public, and also its sequel, a documentary that Kanjanavanit had made about her exhausting experiences with the film-classification board. Kanjanavanit had been persuaded to get an eight-hour flight here to Taipei, and would be answering questions after the screening.
As I took my seat in the darkened lecture theatre, it occurred to me ruefully that I’d at last found something I’d been searching for my entire trip – someone using Shakespeare to comment on censorship and the role of state power. It hadn’t happened in China, but 2,000 miles away from Beijing at the other end of Asia.
The documentary was called Censor Must Die. It was gripping – not so much a making-of as a genre new to me, and presumably everyone else in the audience: a banning-of. Shot using a handheld camera, it trailed the producer Sriwanchipoom around a sequence of frowsty government offices as he attempted to understand why an adaptation of Macbeth – one funded by the government, no less – was causing such high anxiety. We sat with him in waiting rooms and car parks as he attempted to do battle with the pettifogging bureaucracy by which authoritarian regimes do their dirty work. Although not without doleful humour (the censors announce that they must delay one meeting to attend an urgent screening of the family movie Dear Doggies 2), it was cast as a Kafkaesque tragedy, with Sriwanchipoom as a wretched Joseph K failing to find out what, if anything, he has done wrong.
Some had accused the film-makers of sensationalising their plight for publicity, but it was clear the moment Kanjanavanit stood up afterwards that the whole saga had been horrendously unpleasant. Blinking behind large round spectacles, she spoke in a halting voice that had constantly to be redirected towards the microphone. She had the appearance less of a rabble-rouser than a librarian pining to return to the stacks. She looked hollow with tiredness.
As she slipped out of the door I pounced: did she have time for a few more questions? I was a Guardian journalist, writing a book—
She was smiling. ‘I read the Guardian when I was a teenager.’
There’d been copies in Thailand?
She giggled. ‘Boarding school in Godalming. You know – Surrey.’
A cigarette was already in her hand, so we forsook the cool of the lecture theatre for the heat and humidity outside. Though much younger-seeming than her fifty-five years, she spoke in courteous, faintly old-fashioned English that made her sound as though she’d just stepped off the King’s Road in Chelsea.
She began from the day that she and her partner were told that their version of Macbeth wouldn’t wash.
‘Normally they decide immediately – first screening, it’s done. When Manit went two times and still no, he had to go to a third round. I said, “OK, I’m coming with you.”’
Kanjanavanit–who had begun her career as an investigative reporter – brought along her camera. At first the idea was simply to film a legal record; but as the case dragged on, it became obvious that her next film was making itself before her eyes.
I confessed it was still unclear to me exactly what had caused the problems: Shakespeare Must Die had seemed like an elegant but uncontroversial rendering of Macbeth. What was I missing?
Pushing her hair out of the way of her glasses, she explained. You had to understand Thailand, and in particular the role of Thaksin Shinawatra, the populist telecoms tycoon who had become prime minister in 2001 and then been ejected in a coup five years later. The film had originally been funded when Thaksin’s rivals were in power and Thaksin himself in exile. It was when Thaksin’s sister became prime minister – Thai politics, as well as being unusually prone to coups, is deeply incestuous – that their difficulties began. The parallels between Thaksin and Kanjanavanit’s Macbeth/Dear Leader were the issue. A man who had made fortunes by working back-room contacts, Thaksin was accused of bullying tactics against rivals. In its depiction of a similar figure, the film was regarded as sailing far too close to the wind.
In a burst of surreal interpretative genius, one of the modifications the censors had suggested was that Kanjanavanit should film an entirely new scene to appear at the end of the movie, featuring an elderly, sweet-looking
couple solemnly discussing its meaning. Audiences must be made to understand that Macbeth was fiction – nothing more.
Shakespeare’s script was itself most likely an allegory, though a shadowy one. Written for James I soon after he inherited the English throne in 1603, flattering both the monarch’s lineage (James was a distant descendant of the real-life Banquo) and his interest in witchcraft, it was also, surely, a coded warning about the dangers of ambition – a newly promoted King’s Man addressing his king about the limits of regal power. Theatre directors had set it in everything from Stalinist Russia to contemporary Libya. In India just fourteen months earlier, I said, I had seen it being used to criticise the West Bengal government.
‘I used Thaksin to illustrate Shakespeare, not the other way around,’ she replied. ‘If I wanted to criticise him I could just shout rude words on the street; plenty of people do. It’d be much less trouble.’
For now they were stuck in limbo. Shakespeare Must Die was still banned, although to compound the confusion Censor Must Die had been allowed to pass, on the basis that it depicted ‘events that really happened’.
The case wasn’t uppermost in her mind, Kanjanavanit confessed: she was itching to get back to Thailand, where anti-government protestors had been camped out for months. She had been out filming them and was waiting to see how it would end. A military coup was on its way, some said.
What was her working title?
She wore the faintest of smiles. ‘Bangkok Joyride.’
The light was becoming sallow. Above the warm, close smell of the forest surrounding Taipei, there was a sour metallic tang, like copper. A storm was on its way. For almost the first time, I felt a pang of homesickness. Perhaps it was simply talking to someone who sounded British. The previous day, able for the first time to access international news websites, blocked on the mainland, I’d greedily stocked up on world events. Back home it was mid-May: photos of delicate pink cherry blossom and white hawthorn frothing into bud had been doing the rounds on Twitter. Twitter was banned on the mainland too; this was my first glimpse of the British spring. I found it weirdly affecting.
Worlds Elsewhere Page 54
