All the World Is the Bard’s Stage

William Shakespeare is often a hard sell on English-speaking college campuses, and he frequently comes under attack from scholars who have find his plays elitist, imperialist, “Eurocentric,” sexist or racist. But as participants in a weeklong multilingual Shakespeare program starting today at UCLA attest, the Bard certainly travels well.

An institute in Shanghai is devoted to Shakespearean studies. In Germany, his plays are performed 10 times as often as in any English-speaking country. And in villages in India, itinerant productions of such plays as “Julius Caesar” are performed before throngs of up to 10,000 people.

Dozens of theater artists, translators and scholars will be discussing the appeal of Shakespeare in “Shakespeare in the Non-English-Speaking World,” a series of readings, lectures, discussions and performances that will take place at six locations throughout Los Angeles. The first session begins at noon today at UCLA’s International Student Center.

Open to the public, the events are sponsored by the Western Region of the Shakespeare Globe Centre, the support and education arm of the organization that is reconstructing the historic Globe playhouse in England.

Participants will include Zdenek Stribrny, a Shakespearean scholar who was dismissed from his post at a Prague university during the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia; Jean-Claude Carriere, who has translated Shakespeare for Paris-based director Peter Brook, and members of Compania de Teatro en Vecindades, which has given 400 Shakespeare performances in the barrios and alleys of Mexico City since its founding in 1988.

As one participant put it, many English-speaking people “would rather watch paint dry than go to a Shakespeare play,” but other cultures find him far from inaccessible and his plays often generate an excitement that U.S. English teachers would envy.

While modern English-speaking audiences have gotten used to the style perfected by Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud on the Shakespearean stage, emphasizing the mellifluous sounds over the content of the plays, the messages were getting through to people elsewhere. Dissident artists in the Eastern Bloc have used Shakespeare to express political views in a kind of code, according to Felicia Londre, a professor of theater at the University of Missouri in Kansas City.

“What the public wanted was for theaters to say what couldn’t be said in the media,” Londre said.

Fearful of encouraging politically incorrect thoughts, Stalin banned “Hamlet” and the history plays. But following his death “every theater did ‘Hamlet’,” Londre said, recalling one famous production in which huge iron gates filled the stage as Denmark became a metaphorical prison.

Unrestricted by convention, foreign interpreters of Shakespeare have in recent years felt free to blend their own traditions, music and myths into their productions. Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei, a professor of theater at UCLA, recalls a Japanese “Macbeth” with a renowned onnagata, or female impersonator from the Kabuki tradition, portraying Lady Macbeth.

Internationally celebrated director Yukio Ninagawa recently turned Macbeth into a 16th-Century samurai in a production that featured highly ritualized acting. Falling cherry blossoms, symbolizing both beauty and death, resonated with meaning for Japanese audiences.

In India, where a cult of believers in black magic plays a role in the country’s political life, it is the witches in “Macbeth” who evoke powerful associations, said Atul Tiwari, a director and translator from Lucknow, India. “The audience will not only think about the supernatural but also about these people,” he added.

Even in Africa, Shakespeare enjoys immense popularity, said Herbert Shore, associate dean of the USC School of Theater. “Hamlet” was first performed on African soil the same year Shakespeare wrote it--by British sailors for a native audience, according to Shore. More recently, Julius Nyerere, former president of Tanzania, translated “Julius Caesar” and “The Merchant of Venice” into Swahili.

Plays on words and topical references make the comedies more problematic for translators--and often more difficult for English-speaking audiences--than the tragedies, said Anne-Charlotte Harvey, a drama professor at San Diego State. Nevertheless, “Shakespearean comedy is a big hit in Africa,” Shore said. “It fits in with the whole sense of African comedy. There’s a hilarity to it.”

Obviously, a great deal is lost when Shakespeare is translated, but foreign productions do have one advantage, notes Dennis Kennedy, who teaches theater history at the University of Pittsburgh. “Even the oldest translations are closer to the language spoken on the street (than the original), so in foreign languages there may be more direct access,” he said. “We have to filter Shakespeare through an archaic language that’s not ours.”

Last year, Peter Brook surprised European audiences by standing “The Tempest” on its head and casting black Africans as the ruler Prospero and his servant Ariel and a white actor as the slave Caliban. The production incorporated techniques from Japanese, Chinese, Indian and African theater.

Since “The Tempest” is usually interpreted--and sometimes attacked--as a play endorsing Western colonialism, a major element in Shakespeare’s world, Brook’s skirting of this theme through his multinational approach was not universally applauded.

Also controversial was a 1989 production in Turkey of “The Taming of the Shrew,” the comedy that feminists have the hardest time accepting because it ends with the once headstrong Kate declaring her obedience to her husband. In the Turkish version, Kate offers herself to Petruchio; but she has cut her veins, and dies.

While the play received mixed reviews, the audience “loved it,” Turkish critic Zeynep Oral told the International Assn. of Theatre Critics. “They thought it was the most marvelous play they had ever seen, and they identified with Katharine’s fate.”

In interpreting Shakespeare, directors have a lot of latitude, Kennedy said, because there is no unbroken tradition dictating how the plays should be performed, as is the case with other classics such as Moliere’s comedies or the Noh theater of Japan.

“We’ve always come at (Shakespeare) new,” Kennedy said. “When we do Shakespeare, we’re not unveiling a great monument, we’re unveiling ourselves. We’re remaking him in our own image.”

Information about “Shakespeare in the Non-English-Speaking World”: (213) 653-1206. All programs are free, except for a preview performance of “Julius Caesar” at the Mark Taper Forum that will conclude the series on April 28.