Touring productions such as A Midsummer Night's Dream by the Los Angeles' Actors Gang, which will play in the Beijing's National Center for the Performing Arts' Shakespeare cycle, have a subtle impact on Chinese perceptions of the Bard. Provided to China Daily

Subversion and soliloquies

The language instinct

How I discovered the lure of Will power

The Bard in Beijing and beyond

Of all Chinese stage directors, Lin Zhaohua may be the most brilliantly subversive in staging Shakespeare. He doesn't change the text, but he never stops searching for new ways to bring out what he perceives to be new discoveries from the hoary classics. His production of Richard III toned down the royal atmosphere and played the intrigue and conspiracy like a game. His message: backstabbing happens everywhere.

Lin's Hamlet, periodically revived since its 1990 debut, is a psychological drama in which the protagonist must face his own weaknesses as well as the fickleness of fate. As Pu Cunxin, who has essayed most of the leading roles in Lin's productions of Shakespeare, realized, "There is no Danish prince, and I don't have to imitate movements foreign to me. It's just me - the feeble, hopeless, self-torturing intellectual. I learned to channel my own questions and interpretations into the play and find release and communication in the world of Shakespeare."

Lin's visualization of the most famous soliloquy in English theater - "To be or not to be" - has three actors speaking the lines together, facing each other, but off by a beat or two, thus creating an effect that the character is struggling with various aspects of himself. If a soliloquy is a solo aria, this one is now a trio.

This year, Lin's much acclaimed Coriolanus - premiered in 2007 and with a side stop in Edinburgh - will be revived as part of a strong lineup that the National Center for the Performing Arts has designed to celebrate the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth. The celebration also includes Dunsinane by the National Theater of Scotland and Royal Shakespeare Company, a sequel to the Macbeth story, A Midsummer Night's Dream directed by Tim Robbins, a Romeo and Juliet that uses mostly body language, and Verdi's operatic rendition of Othello, among the other offerings.

This may well be China's busiest Shakespeare year - at least for a single venue - since the first Shakespeare Festival was held in April 1986, when 25 plays were staged in Beijing and Shanghai. But then, Shakespeare has never been out of vogue in the Middle Kingdom. In 1949 alone, the year New China was founded, as many as 13 of his plays were presented across the country.