King Lear wants to divide his worldly possessions between his three daughters, in exchange for their devotion. While Lear’s elder daughters flatter him, he disowns his youngest daughter, who will not lie or exaggerate her love for him.
A non-verbal physical theatre interpretation of Shakespeare’s tragedy King Lear, by award-winning director Shu-wing Tang and performed by an all-female cast premiered in Hong Kong in 2021 and was performed in Shanghai in 2023. Director Shu-wing Tang won Director of the Year at the International Association of Theatre Critics, and Cecilia Yip won Performer of the Year for her portrayal of King Lear. The show was also nominated for Best Sound Design (Anthony Yeung) in the Hong Kong Drama Awards.
In this interview, director Shu-wing Tang shares his thoughts on his process and approach to this production, about his reflections on the theatre landscape in places around the globe that he has travelled with his work, his take on the future of theatre and it’s evolution!
You’ve directed Shakespeare’s works on a number of occasions. What is it about his plays that appeals to you?
Shakespeare is like a text book for everyone’s life. Rather than instructive, it is full of unknowns and riddles, igniting boundless interpretation and imagination. If you are in trouble, go to his plays.
This production of King Lear is non-verbal. What was your approach to the text and how did you transform it into a non-verbal physical theatre production?
My general approach to a text is to replace words, if possible, with non-verbal communication because the Body is the Thing itself. I use a technique called pre-verbal expression, exploring how humans express themselves before the invention of languages. I identify some fundamental dramaturgical themes, in the case of King Lear, love, jealousy and freedom, turning them into a process of deconstruction and synthesis, eliminating things which I think are redundant, rendering the key forces of life more lucid and vivid, while adding my own associations whenever intuition comes. It is a necessary experiment because saying too much kills poetry. For instance, I reduced scene 1 of Act 1 from the usual 20 minutes to just 5 minutes. I name this a minimalist aesthetics starting from the body, generating a physical existence beyond the classical definition of mime and dance.
The cast is all women; what was your thinking behind that?
I only believe in two things: human soul is genderless and you are a reflection of myself. Staging an all-female cast is more exciting and timelier than the reverse or a mixed gender cast, because it invites us to reimagine human relationship among ourselves and to Nature. Today, we certainly need more feminine energy to redress humanity.
What can audiences expect from this production of King Lear?
Your preconceived ideas on Shakespeare are reoriented to new grounds where you discover yourself immersed in a succession of visual tableaux. You will find that when we speak, we express only what we know. When we listen, we may be able to learn things which we do not know. In a world full of chaos, face to face listening seems much more urgent than speech. My King Lear will once again affirm that there are things only live performances can do.
Do you have a favourite moment in the production?
In the performance itself, the last visual tableau is the most breath-taking when all my performers group themselves again to show hope by channelling their collective energy to face new challenges. Are they fictitious or real? I cannot tell even for myself. In the whole production process, my favourite moment appeared when all my designers concurred in what the essential elements of this creation are so that we really started to work as a team.
While promoting and presenting Hong Kong’s theatre on international stages, what are your reflections on the theatre landscape and audience engagement to this art form in different regions?
I would speak about the regions which I am familiar with. In East Asia, especially in Greater China including Hong Kong, theatre possesses a clear distinction between works which aim at mass appeal and those which do not. The former usually refers to musicals, immersive theatres and circus arts, though we see some crossovers in recent years especially after the Pandemic. The audience engagement is in general reflective of the dominant social and economic conditions at a particular time. While the two ends of the audience spectrum remain clearly recognisable, on the one hand, entertainment, on the other hand, pursuit of personal goal via theatre, I would say there is a growing mix of the in-between which may cover a variety of reasons for their going to theatre, such as, to follow an idol, to create social circles, to acquire a bigger data base of personal knowledge, to be temporarily diverted from our digital world by joining face to face encounter, and many more.
As an educator interacting with emerging theatre talents, how do you perceive the future of theatre production and presentation might evolve in Hong Kong or globally? What changes or innovations do you foresee in the way theatre is created, performed, and experienced going forward?
Theatre is defined by what theatre alone can do: live performance. However, we see a growing trend of technological input, trying to pose questions on what “live” means. No matter what, theatre depicts those forces of life affecting humans so that our lives become unbalanced and we urge ourselves to find spiritual outlets as soon as possible. If technology can enhance this attempt to strike balances, I do not mind incorporating it in my work. This is even more so for the younger generation, because technology is becoming more and more dominant in their whole being, almost redefining the meaning of Nature, Life and Human Existence. I foresee that theatre will follow this technological trend in their conceptualisation, production and performance process. Young people tend to create more and more technologically-based, multi-imagery works, or, in short, more “form-orientated”, usually asking the question “What and How” rather than “Why”. On the thematic level, young people, regardless of races, genders and cultures, are being drawn closer to each other through technology. They have more common languages and concerns, which are driving them to create works which speak about these issues.
Interview by Protima Chatterjee
The performances at Riverside Studios mark the production’s UK premiere and the beginning of a tour, with dates in Craiova, Romania; Berlin, Germany; and a return to Hong Kong for the first edition of the International Shakespeare Festival in Hong Kong.
Cecilia Yip returns to the role of King Lear for the run at Riverside Studios. A celebrated stage and screen actor in China, Yip has won two Best Actress awards at the Hong Kong Film Awards. She is joined in the production by Lindzay Chan, Amanda Leung, Cassandra Tang, Peggy Chow, Ting-Kwan Lau, Ki-yan Ko, Corina Druc and Costinela Ungureanu.
King Lear is presented by Tang Shu-wing Theatre Studio, in partnership with National Theatre Marin Sorescu Craiova, Romania and sponsored by Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office in London.
Running Time: 90 minutes
Tickets: www.riversidestudios.co.uk or 0208 237 1010
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