See This Introduction to Shakespeare in Its 20th Year in China

Vincent R. Vinci, Contributing Editor | Jul 4, 2024 3:30 pm | Add a comment | 163 reads

"To be, or not to be, that is the question..." so goes the famous line from Shakespeare's drama Hamlet. But can you recite the rest without looking it up? If you want to learn a bit more about the Bard, and the story of one young man's introduction to it, then you'll not want to miss Revel's World of Shakespeare.

Performed regularly across China by American actor and director Joseph Graves, the one-man show has captivated audiences for the past two decades, and is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year.

We spoke with Graves in the lead up to this year's performance in Beijing, starting Jul 12, to learn more about the play, the man behind it, and his admiration for theater.

How does it feel to be getting ready to get back on the stage once again for Revel’s World of Shakespeare?
It feels great! I am always delighted for the opportunity to perform Revel’s World of Shakespeare. Though, since I wrote the piece 20 years ago, not a year has gone by without my giving dozens of performances of Revel. (The one exception to that was during the first year of the pandemic; I did not perform then because, of course, all performances of all plays in China were canceled. But other than that year, Revel has consistently been a part of my performing life and has been performed in more than 100 different Chinese cities.) But, of course, these upcoming performances in July at the Er Chi Theater are very special to me as they mark the twentieth anniversary since I premiered the show in Beijing in July of 2004.

Going back to the beginning, what first got you interested in theater, and what led you to keeping up the art in China?
The show Revel’s World of Shakespeare explains a part of my theatrical inclinations, at least as they relate to Shakespeare. The play deals in part with the kind of mentorship I received from a very early age related to Shakespeare. But really, I think I was born wanting to act and write and direct. I wrote my first play at five years old; it was about a cowboy, a witch, and a magic guitar. I performed as the guitar playing cowboy, and I tricked some neighborhood kids into performing with me. I’ve not been able to stop my obsession with the theater since then.

When directing plays in China, you’ve chosen to blend Western and Eastern elements, and English and Chinese language. Why is this, and what sort of elements might these be?
I came to China because I was invited here to direct a Shakespeare play. My knowledge then of Eastern theater was limited but informed, to a degree, by some productions of Carlo Gozzi plays that I directed in Los Angeles. Gozzi was an eighteenth-century Italian playwright who was one of the first to write plays in the Commedia dell’arte style. Gozzi was also strongly influenced by Eastern theater, at least what he understood, or imagined he understood, about Eastern theater. So, when I was directing his plays in America, I studied quite a bit about Chinese opera forms to understand how they inflected Gozzi’s writing.

When I got to China and started attending Chinese operas, I became deeply interested in the art and in the power of the operas, and in the skill and magical precision of the performers, as well as the very unique, but deeply moving-to-me ways in which Eastern opera forms express human emotions. I found a kind of theatrical bond between the formality of the physical expressions of Chinese opera and the intense and beautiful formality of Shakespearean language.

I have worked on transliterations of five of Shakespeare’s plays into various Chinese opera forms, and I find those kinds of cross-cultural experiments not only thrilling but theatrically enriching. Because I have been very influenced by what I have come to understand about Eastern operas, and by my work on some of them, I often find that by including hints and whispers and echoes of Eastern styles into the Western plays, some of the meaning in those plays is clarified to an audience in a way that it might not have been had I ignored the Eastern influence.

Besides Revel’s World of Shakespeare, what’s the most popular play you’ve directed in China?
Though early on during my time in China, several of my Shakespeare productions proved very popular with audiences, probably the most popular of the 60 plus shows I have directed in China is the musical, MAN OF LA MANCHA. It is based on the novel Don Quixote and its author, Miguel de Cervantes. LA MANCHA was the first play we produced at Sevenages, and it has been running now for over 12 years, performing in dozens of Chinese cities. It has been seen by literally millions of Chinese audiences and continues to be very, very popular. I think of LA MANCHA as the most Shakespearean of musicals and its story, characters and wonderful music resonate deeply with people of all ages and across all cultures. And, in fact, we will present LA MANCHA again soon, in both Beijing and Shanghai in September and October of this year.

So besides theater, you’ve also served as an associate professor in the School of Foreign Languages at Peking University. Are you still involved in the goings on at the university to some degree?
I spent 19 years at Beida as both a professor and the artistic director of Peking University’s Institute of World Theater and Film. I treasure my time there. Through the Institute, I was able to bring ten shows from other countries to China and take 12 productions from China to other countries. I also produced and directed a number of cross-cultural productions which often included Eastern and Western theater actors and technicians collaborating. These productions found actors from the West -- from such companies in England as The National Theatre, and The RSC, and from America, from Broadway, The Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and The Guthrie Theatre -- working with Chinese actors both professional and amateur.

Also, I along with Professor David Parker then from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, ran the National Chinese Universities Shakespeare Festival for ten years. This Festival involved dozens and dozens of Chinese universities and several thousand Chinese students and professors in performances of Shakespeare’s plays in English. Over the years, we went through the entire cannon more than twice with that festival. Also, dozens of theater-related classes became an ongoing part of the curriculums of many different Chinese universities through the work of the Institute.

So, though I no longer teach at Beida, I do maintain close ties with colleagues there and at Tsinghua and continue to consult on the growth of theater and theater-related studies in Chinese Liberal Arts Universities.

Now, back to Revel’s World of Shakespeare, what’s the play about and what can audience members expect for the show next Friday?
Revel is loosely based on my real-life experiences. It tells the story of a six-year-old boy’s introduction to Shakespeare at the hands of a drunken headmaster of a Boy’s school in London in the early 1960s. The headmaster’s name was Clive T. Revel (The Revel of the play’s title.) and he was as terrifying as he was entertaining and as tragic as he was exhilarating.

It is the story of the relationship between Little Joe (based on me) and headmaster Revel, my teacher, and how I caught the good infection of Shakespeare from the Bard-diseased mind of this crazy, though often delightful, headmaster. The story is full of laughter and tears as well as confusion and revelations, and all of it is infused with the words of Shakespeare, and redolent with an understanding of his continued relevance to humanity today. If you are new to Shakespeare this show is a great way to be painlessly and happily introduced to our greatest Western writer, and if you are a long time Shakespeare aficionado, you will delight, I think, in the various levels on which the play works at the same time.

This year marks the 20th anniversary edition of Revel’s World of Shakespeare. Are there any special features in the performance?
There is nothing new that I am including in these performances, technically or otherwise. However, it has been tremendously exciting to me with this show, over the last few years in particular, to experience as an actor how the differing audience reactions to the piece change my performance. And never in a negative way. This show, far more than any other of the dozens and dozens of plays I have acted in, feels like a true shared experience with an audience. In other words, it no longer seems a show that an audience merely sits and watches, but it feels now much more like a journey we are taking together, a mutual encounter with a story. So I very much look forward to having that kind of mutual experience in these upcoming performances.

Also, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Revel there is a very special event before the upcoming performances. Certain audience members can participate in a thing I call, Instant Shakespeare. This is a 45-minute class I teach on performing Shakespeare for children and adults from ages eight to 80. All those participating will learn from me the fundamentals of how to act in a Shakespeare play. And those participating will, in fact, give a short performance of a scene from Shakespeare’s great play, The Tempest. If you are interested in being a part of this exclusive 20th anniversary special event, please contact the Sevenages offices for information.

Monologues Revel's World of Shakespeare is being performed from Jul 12-14 at Beijing Erqi Theater. Tickets are RMB 80-480 per person, and can be purchased with a five percent discount by scanning the QR code in the poster above.