![Rosaline’s Curse [based on Romeo and Juliet]](https://globalshakespeares.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/rosalines-curse-tayebi-masoud-2023.jpg)
Rosaline’s Curse is an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.
After Romeo betrays Rosaline and falls in love with Juliet. She decides to torment their souls with a curse every day. So, every day the two souls inevitably tell the story of their love until their death. Meanwhile, Lucifer helps Rosaline.
Romeo and Juliet in Saigon was directed by Khai Thu Nguyen and Cliff Moustache and performed on July 15, 2012. A 50-minute adaptation of Shakespeare, this work is a result of an intensive workshop at the Hat Boi Theater in Ho Chi Minh City. The play uses dance, movement and Hat Boi techniques to tell about the importance of love and the choice one takes about love. Romeo and Juliet want to find the truth of their heart, but have difficulty because those around them are embroiled in conflict. They risk their life for true love.
Hayat Bayram Olsa (If Life were a Holiday) is a film directed by Orhan Aksoy in 1973. It is a loose and domesticised adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Set in a small town in the seaside where again feuding families try to prevent a happy ending for the lovers, now performed by Kadir İnanır and Hülya Koçyiğit.
On the eve of a dark peace, when the shades of sun are too sad to show themselves,a love bushed out of a long-standing hatred. Such a marvelous and sudden love for someone you abhor…In the beautiful city of Verona, the hearts stain with the blood of other hearts.Two unlucky children, Romeo and Juliet, become lovers and the story beginson the edge of pain, exile and death…
This production of Romeo and Juliet – Shakespeare For All (Romeu e Julieta – Shakespeare para todos) was performed at the Federal University of Santa Catarina Theater (Teatro da Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina) in Florianópolis, Santa Catarina, Brazil on November, 28th, 2015 by the Elefants Theatre Company (Elefants Companhia de Teatro).
Last night the local mayor who had once played Hamlet in the state theatre inaugurated the first Bitola Shakespeare Festival. It opened grandly with a bilingual Macedonian and Russian production of Romeo and Juliet performed by the Vera Komissarzhevskaya Theatre, St Petersburg and the National Theatre Bitola.
Bitola Shakespeare Festival
Romeo and Juliet is Oh Tae-suk’s first adaptation of Shakespeare. His choice was deliberate: Two lovers caught in between warring families in a divided community — a pretty good analogue for the Korean situation. Oh’s adaptation is designed as an apology to Korea’s youth from the older generations for their failure to resolve their country’s troubles.
In the Spring of 2008, visiting director Chen Lincang of the National Academy of Chinese Theatre Arts in Beijing worked with students at the Binghamton University Theatre Department to stage a production of Romeo and Juliet. The result was a new interpretation of the play performed in English, but in the beijing opera style.
Tromeo and Juliet is a 1997 American independent transgressive romantic black comedy film and a loose adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet from Troma Entertainment. The film was directed by Lloyd Kaufman from a screenplay by Kaufman and James Gunn, who also served as associate director.
Based on the classical love story from William Shakespeare, the actors tell the story of this ill-fated romance, mixing it with a cheesecake that takes the name of the protagonists. The blood of the lovers is guava jam, the sword fights are conducted with spatulas and a bite of a Rich Tea biscuit can be a delicious alternative to a broken heart. After the success of Hamlet sou eu and Granda Pinta, Teatro Praga are returning to Teatro Maria Matos with a surprising interpretation of Shakespeare’s classic play.
Shakespeare has held an active place in Brazilian academics and stages for decades, including the production of world-renowned performances that have made their way to the Bard’s England, as well as to other prestigious arenas. The COVID-19 pandemic drastically affected much of what happens in the theater, but surely it has not affected the status and presence of Shakespeare in Brazil. An impressive variety of creations have taken place in the recent times of isolation and social distancing, and have brought with them some contributions to theater both during the pandemic itself and also after the vaccines and reopening of the auditoriums.
Many screen and stage adaptations of the classics are informed by a philosophical investment in literature’s reparative merit, a preconceived notion that performing the canon can make one a better person. Inspirational narratives, in particular, have instrumentalized the canon to serve socially reparative purposes.
Social recuperation of disabled figures loom large in adaptation, and many reparative adaptations tap into a curative quality of Shakespearean texts. When Shakespeare’s phrases or texts are quoted, even in fragments, they serve as an index of intelligence of the speaker. Governing the disability narrative is the trope about Shakespeare’s therapeutic value.
There are two strands of recuperative adaptations. The first is informed by the assumption that the dramatic situations exemplify moral universals. The second strand consists of adaptations that problematize heteronormativity and psychological universals in liberal humanist visions of the canon. This approach is self-conscious of deeply contextual meanings of the canon. As a result, it lends itself to the genres of parody, metatheatre, and metacinema.
Shakespeare is a local force to be reckoned with in the global marketplace and in digital and analog archives of collective memory. With the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth in 2014 and quatercentenary in 2016, there are several high-profile instances of global Shakespeare being tapped for its market value. The exchange value of Shakespeare is reflected in uses of Shakespearean themes and artifacts in appropriations, cultural diplomacy, and venues where nation states project soft power. There are no world markets without the proliferation of archives built on collective cultural memory. Conversely, there would be no archives without the cultural marketplace to validate that Shakespearean artifacts are archive-worthy in the first place.
The worldwide and so many times staged text of Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare is performed by a young theatre troupe. Alone on stage, without adults, Romeo, Juliet, Mercutio, Benvolio and the rest of friends that – we suppose – should be on stage, in fact are seen here as an urban tribe, will invade the setting in the same way as if they were in fair Verona. A setting where bodies are both set designs and objects, complements for the body, in the sequence of events for the actor. So we shall see the characters, celebrating their bodies and tender age, in a plaza, dancing, singing, fighting and “playing” to stage Romeo and Juliet, playing that they are going a bit crazy with their tasks. In this manner, clothed with the text and white robes, these young people will go Crazy for Romeo and Juliet (Locos X Romeo y Julieta).
Romeo y Julieta, a new adaptation of William Shakespeare’s play, Romeo and Juliet, produced by OFF Teatre and directed by José Zamit was performed on July 3, 2012 at the Teatro Olympia in Valencia, Spain. OFF Teatre, an alternative fringe drama school and theatre company founded by Rafael Cruz Izquierdo (Figueres, 1967 – Valencia, 2008) in 2003, has become the benchmark for the independent performing arts in the Valencian Community (Spain). This counter-cultural space, as originally conceived by Cruz, was created in response to those fundamental and collaborative ideas enacted by most European states during the consolidation of the EU at the beginning of the XXI century.
Grupo Galpão’s Romeu e Julieta is an intercultural adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, a production that intentionally draws on a range of popular practices such as street theatre, circus performance and the tradition of the commedia dell’arte, as well as on elements from the cultural imaginary of Minas Gerais in southeast Brazil. This production was staged in 2000 at the Globe Theatre in London.
Grupo Galpão’s Romeu e Julieta (1992), directed by Gabriel Villela, is an intercultural adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, a production that intentionally draws on a range of popular practices such as street theatre, circus performance and the tradition of the commedia dell’arte, as well as on elements from the cultural imaginary of Minas Gerais in southeast Brazil.
William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet is a 1996 American romantic crime tragedy film directed, co-produced, and co-written by Baz Luhrmann, co-produced by Gabriella Martinelli, and co-written by Craig Pearce. It is an adaptation and modernization of William Shakespeare’s tragedy Romeo and Juliet. The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes in the title roles of two teenagers who fall in love, despite their being members of feuding families. Brian Dennehy, John Leguizamo, Pete Postlethwaite, Paul Sorvino and Diane Venora also star in supporting roles.
Of all Shakespeare’s plays, Hamlet has attracted the most Chinese translators, with no fewer than twelve different translations into Mandarin1 having been published since 1922.
This essay reflects upon the interculturality of spectatorship: How do we relate to what we watch, when a performance foregrounds and implicates the particular cultural position from which we are watching, with its values, habits, and limitations, all of which define what we are able to see? What part does the spectator play in the staging of an encounter between Shakespeare and Asian forms and worldviews?
Kırık Kalpler Bankası (The Bank of Broken Hearts) is a film directed by Onur Ünlü in 2016. Ünlü, also the scriptwriter of the film, adapts Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet by shifting the family feud to enmity between two local football teams in İstanbul. The rivalry between Yeşil Takım (Green Team) and Mor Kulüp (Purple Club) emanates from a personal grudge between Yusuf Yağmur (Haluk Bilginer) and Rüstem Tor (Ahmet Mümtaz Taylan), both of whom are acting like football coaches of these teams.
Ophelia’s Window was performed in 2020 in Baghdad, Iraq and directed by Monadhil Daood, who previously directed “Romeo and Juliet in Baghdad” and performed in other Shakespeare-derived Arabic plays including Sulayman Al-Bassam’s “Al-Hamlet Summit” (as Polonius) and “Richard III” (as Catesby).
Exiled Iraqi playwright and director Jawad al-Assadi wrote and originally staged the play Ophelia’s Window in 1994 in Cairo, Egypt. The play (loosely allegorizing Saddam Hussein as Claudius) was later published as Forget Hamlet in 2000; this is its first performance inside Iraq. Margaret Litvin, Associate Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at Boston University, has translated the play into English.
Synopsis
Ophelia watches Claudius murder the king and inaugurate a reign of terror unopposed by passive Hamlet. Claudius orders blind dissident Laertes tortured and liquidated; silences Gertrude; tries to seduce Ophelia; and sends two goons to assassinate Hamlet. A pair of gravediggers provides sarcastic commentary throughout.
In the same vein as Dead Poet’s Society, the story is set in the repressed atmosphere of an all male boarding school where four students engage in a clandestine reading of Romeo and Juliet. As the boys express their repressed emotions and passions through Shakespeare’s verse, they start to merge with the roles of the characters in Romeo and Juliet, and the tale blurs the boundaries between reality and fiction.
Josh was a 2000 film directed and co-written by Mansoor Khan and inspired by Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The movie takes place in 1980 and is set in Goa, India. The story is centered around two rival gangs. The younger brother of one gang leader falls in love with the twin sister of the other gang leader.
Chicken Rice War (Jiyuan qiaohe, dir. Chee Kong Cheah [CheeK], Mediacorp Raintree Pictures, 2000).
Supported by the Singapore Film Commission (SFC) and shot as a mockumentary with MTV-style rapid cuts and whooshing camerawork, the comedy film is Mediacorp Raintree Picture’s first movie primarily in English and the first feature-length work by CheeK, editorial director of MTV Asia (headquartered in Singapore). It frames and trivializes the feud in Romeo and Juliet by reducing the generations-old dispute between the aristocratic Montague and Capulet families, leading to bloodshed, to the rivalry between the Wong and Chan families, who own competing chicken rice stalls next to each other in a hawker center (semi-open-air food court) in the prosperous city-state.
Donna Woodford-Gormley‘s new book, Shakespeare in Cuba (2021), uses the lens of cultural anthropophagy to explore Cuban adaptations of Shakespeare. According to the theory of cultural anthropophagy, or literary cannibalism, a culture, like Cuba, can consume Shakespearean plays, but digest them and embody them in new ways, giving life to both the consumed and the consumer. The theory has its roots in Latin America, and so it is an appropriate tool for examining how Shakespeare’s plays have been consumed, digested, and embodied in Cuban forms, but it is also an inclusive theory that places neither culture in a position of subservience and allows all to join the feast.
How might we de-colonize hegemonic knowledge production about East Asia and its relationship with the West? A recent interview with Alexa Alice Joubin draws on new perspectives on cultural exchange in her book, Shakespeare and East Asia (Oxford University Press, 2021), which promotes treatment of Asian performing arts as original epistemologies rather than footnotes to the white, Western canon, and theory.
In the 1930s, the Soviet Union (USSR) lauded Shakespeare as a prophetic playwright who, while writing in early modern England, foresaw the future revolutions and the eventual advent of socialism. Shakespeare studies and performance became an important part of the Soviet claims to cultural and moral authority, throughout the Stalinist period and beyond.
For example, in a 1942 letter recently discovered in the Folger Institutional Archives, Soviet scholars and theater practitioners argue that the Soviet state’s appreciation of Shakespeare identifies it as deserving of American assistance in the Second World War.
Building upon Jacques’ theatrum mundi trope, 7 Şekspir Müzikali visualises the seven ages of man from cradle to grave. Being a collection of several excerpts from different translators, including those made by the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA) alum Haluk Bilginer (1954-…) himself, the musical is built upon Bilginer’s almost one person performance where the rest of the cast as female fools accompany his dancing and singing through a well-choreographed pace. Performing all seven stages of man singlehandedly by referring to social and theatrical issues alike, Bilginer displays his great acting and life-long love relationship with Shakespeare in this almost two-hour musical.
Since the nineteenth century, stage and film directors have mounted hundreds of adaptations of Shakespeare drawn on East Asian motifs. In her new book, Shakespeare and East Asia, Alexa Alice Joubin explores five fascinating themes surrounding racial and gender dynamics. Gender roles in the play take on new meanings in translation, and familiar and unfamiliar accents expanded the characters’ racial identities.
These adaptations break new ground in sound and spectacle. They serve as a vehicle for social reparation. They provide a forum where artists and audiences can grapple with the contemporary issues of racial and gender equality, including transgender identities, and they forge a new path for world cinema and theatre.
You are cordially invited to join one of the book launches.
The second annual Shakespeare Festival in Turkey took place on April 5-20, 2019 co-chaired by Prof. Dr. Ömer Sekerci and Dr. İlker Özçelik of Suleyman Demirel University. With a total of 26 events over 14 days including six live performances, three recorded performances and a multi-speaker conference, the festival consisted of a wide range of exciting events held in Isparta, İstanbul, Ankara, and İzmir.
The Lancaster Campus of HACC, Central Pennsylvania’s Community College, hosted its fourth annual humanities symposium from April 11-13, 2017. The three-day event, titled “Shaking Out Shakespeare,” attracted over 600 students, faculty, and community members, and explored the profound influence of William Shakespeare on the arts, humanities, and sciences.
Throwing a good party takes an inordinate amount of work, and Shakespeare commemorations are no different. I’m sure many of the organizers of the myriad events honoring Shakespeare’s death (and more optimistically, 400 years of afterlife) at some point during 2016 thought, “Why did I get myself into this?” Some of their other guests may too have shared a sense of the irony—dare we say overkill?—in making a bigger deal of the death than the 450th birthdate two years prior.
Excerpt: When the first Critical Survey special issue on Arab Shakespeares (CS 19:3, Winter 2007) came out nearly a decade ago, the topic was a curiosity. There existed no up-to-date monograph in English on Arab theatre, let alone on Arab Shakespeare. Few Arabic plays had been translated into English. Few British or American theatregoers had seen a play in Arabic. In the then tiny but fast-growing field of international Shakespeare appropriation studies (now ‘Global Shakespeare’) there was a great post-9/11 hunger to know more about the Arab world but also a lingering prejudice that Arab interpretations of Shakespeare would necessarily be derivative or crude, purely local in value.
How do Arab theatre makers navigate a “World Shakespeare” festival, maneuvering between interesting times in their home countries and the expectations of British and global funders and audiences? A recent article by Margaret Litvin, Saffron Walkling, and Raphael Cormack explores some of the contingencies, ironies, and unexpected beauties of these collaborations.
Gustavo Gasparani and Sergio Módena adapted William Shakespeare’s Richard III into a one man show with Gasparani playing 26 different characters. The text was reworked into a script that introduces a Narrator who conducts the plot and resorts to omissions, additions and interpolations. There are no changes in terms of time or setting. Simplicity sets the tone of the production; set and costume design elements are reduced to a minimum, to stimulate the audience’s imagination. The resources employed aimed at adding a touch of humor and lightness to the story, as well as resonating with the reality and the collective imagination of Brazilian audiences.
