Hong Kong to see Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Cantonese

A new generation of drama students at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts are preparing their versions of Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. To be performed on selected days from April 27 to May 14, neither of the two Cantonese productions stick to the original script.

Twelfth Night uses the 1986 translation by Rupert Chan Kwan-yiu, who changed the setting to Tang dynasty China and liberally adapted the text by including poems inspired by Tang classics.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, under the direction of lecturer Tony Wong Lung-pun, will use a colloquialised script and feature aerial acrobatics, with actors bouncing off a bed in the middle of the stage.

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Wong says he prefers to avoid literal translations of Shakespeare that result in the use of classical Chinese.

“The text is important, of course. After all, the wonderful images and similes are all in the lines. But my feeling is that translating the exact poetry of the original is very difficult for any non-English production, so it’s best not to try. So lines do not have to rhyme in my version, and there’s a lot of physical theatre, which helps bring out the dream/nightmare and love/hate qualities in the play,” he says.

However, Roy Szeto, the senior lecturer directing Twelfth Night, says he loves the classical Chinese in Chan’s script, which Chung Ying Theatre commissioned for a 1989 performance.

Titled Yuen Siu in Chinese (referring to the festival known as Chinese Valentine’s Day),the play made a strong impression on Szeto when he first saw it as a teenager.