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Enid Tsui

“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!”
“Thou art a boil, a plague sore, an embossed carbuncle in my corrupted blood.”
“O, that way madness lies.”
King Lear must have some of the best lines in Shakespeare, surely. But Hong Kong’s best-known interpreter of The Bard is about to present a new performance that strips all language from the tragedy, relying instead on bodily interactions and occasional howls of anguish.

The emotional intensity and action-packed plots of Shakespeare’s plays do lend themselves to physical expressions. Hong Kong Ballet’s June performance of Romeo and Juliet, for example, showed how fervent language can be transmogrified through dance and music.
In Asian theatres, King Lear has been adapted into Chinese Jingju, Japanese Noh and Indian Kathakali drama, where masks, codified gestures and dance leave the original text much reduced and altered. The play has also been turned completely wordless by a number of physical theatre groups in the US and Europe.
Audience’s constant clapping interrupts Hong Kong Sinfonietta concert
For Tang Shu-wing, his non-verbal King Lear, which features an all-female cast and opens on October 28 at the Hong Kong Arts Centre in Wan Chai, is a natural extension of his earlier, groundbreaking work in the “theatre of gesture”.
In 2012, he collaborated with choreographers Mui Cheuk-yin and Xing Liang to turn Cao Yu’s modern Chinese novel Thunderstorm into a mute dance performance, which has since been restaged nine times around the world. And one of his best-known Cantonese Shakespeare adaptations, Titus Andronicus 2.0, which debuted in 2009, takes a minimalist approach to the blood-soaked drama, replacing much of the words with music and body language.
Tang directed Hamlet, his first Shakespeare play, in 2006. By then, he was already a highly respected theatre practitioner with a special interest in physical theatre, dance and pre-verbal means of expression.

“I had been teaching at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts for just over a year then,” says Tang, who later became dean of the academy’s School of Drama. “I felt that it was good training for students to tackle older classics and Hamlet has special challenges and a mysterious aura.
“How do you give the soliloquy in Cantonese, for example? How do you react to your father’s ghost? How does Ophelia go mad?”
He has revisited Hamlet numerous times since, while turning his minimalist style towards other Shakespeare works: Macbeth, The Rape of Lucrece and Titus Andronicus. And there will be more.
“I want to do all four great tragedies. So after King Lear, there’s Othello left,” he says, explaining that his fixation on Shakespeare is not just about the language and the universality of the themes, but also the complexity of the storytelling.
Not that Shakespeare’s greatness is beyond dispute. In a 1906 essay, Russian author Leo Tolstoy said King Lear showed the playwright as an overrated hack with its ridiculous plot and tedious lines.
This is a challenge to myself. How do I distil the many words of Shakespeare and come up with an artistic proposition?
Tang Shu-wing
Tang says what he took away from Tolstoy’s critique was the infinite possibility of looking at Shakespeare. He decided to make a fresh stab at King Lear’s familiar story of pride, power and downfall by focusing on where language can fail.
That failure is particularly evident in two parts of the play. The first is when Cordelia tells the king, her father, she cannot flatter him the same way as her two duplicitous sisters (Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave / My heart into my mouth), even though she loves him more. Later, when she dies, words fail for King Lear, whose gut-wrenching response is an animalistic “howl, howl, howl, howl!”
And so Tang asked his cast of nine actresses, including veterans Cecilia Yip Tung (who plays King Lear) and Lindzay Chan Ling-chi (Gloucester), to tell the whole story without words. There is some dance but mostly, meanings are conveyed by looks, stance and gestures.

Watching a rehearsal at the studio in a Kwai Chung factory building, one is struck by how the cast and Tang refine the acting gesture by gesture.
Tang says the all-female cast is to counter the misogyny inherent in many of Shakespeare’s plays. “Four hundred years ago, the mentality at the time allowed characters to curse women, to beat them up, and demonise them. Today, gender is a more liquid concept, which is why in my Macbeth, the lead actor and actress swapped roles halfway through the play. For King Lear, I think it will be interesting to ask the cursed gender to play all the roles.”
At the rehearsal, Yip, wearing a long, blond wig and gesturing wildly, is convincing as a foolish, frightened, angry old man; her expressive face is well-suited for the mute role. Chan’s Gloucester needs to convey the subtle subtext of a father torn between two sons, one legitimate and the other not. She practises fine details such as the exact flick of the wrist that can convey a cold disregard rather than a more affectionate dismissal.
A lot of the action is very physical: King Lear’s tussle with Goneril, for example, and the killing of Cordelia. Meanwhile, Cassandra Tang Tin-sum, who plays both Cordelia and the Fool, switches personality at the flick of a switch, or rather, through her posture and facial expressions.

It is a good test for the actors, but what does taking away the words really accomplish?
“This is a challenge to myself,” Tang says. “How do I distil the many words of Shakespeare and come up with an artistic proposition? How do I fix the problems I encounter along the way? The harder it is, the more joy and satisfaction there is to be found.”
Ultimately, it is a way to immerse the audience in the drama, he says.
“You can adapt Shakespeare in several ways. Localise it, like Hong Kong Ballet’s Romeo and Juliet; do it as a museum piece and retain the original historic settings; or like this production, [which is] none of the above. Does it work? The audience will have to decide.”
“King Lear”, Tang Shu-wing Theatre Studio, Shouson Theatre, Hong Kong Arts Centre, 2 Harbour Road, Wan Chai, 8pm, Oct 28-30, 3pm, Oct 30-31. Ticket from Urbtix: HK$450, HK$380, HK$320


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Shakespeare play King Lear without words – Hong Kong director’s all-female adaptation puts a fresh spin on the famous tragedy

A rehearsal of Tang Shu-wing’s adaptation of William Shakespeare’s King Lear in Kwai Chung, Hong Kong. Photo: Xiaomei Chen

Director Tang Shu-wing (right) with his King Lear cast at a rehearsal. Photo: Xiaomei Chen

The cast rehearse Tang’s adaptation. Photo: Xiaomei Chen

Women play every role in Tang’s adaptation. Photo: Xiaomei Chen

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Tang Shu-wing’s non-verbal King Lear uses gestures, bodily interactions and occasional howls of anguish to immerse audiences in the Shakespearean tragedy
He says the all-female cast is a counter to the misogyny inherent in many of Shakespeare’s plays



Tang Shu-wing’s non-verbal, all-female King Lear uses gestures, bodily interactions and occasional howls of anguish to immerse audiences in the Shakespearean tragedy.
