LONDON: The Actors' Church

Thursday 22nd September, 2016

8:00pm

Event information

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come?

William Shakespeare and Tang Xianzu works are united in an East-meets-West performance marking the 400th anniversary commemorating the two playwrights, staged by British and Chinese practitioners and performers as Ke Jun and Leon Rubin realise their six year collaboration.

Shakespearean characters such as King Lear and Macbeth enter the world of Lu Sheng's existential dream, expertly delivered by a mixed cast of Chinese and British performers including Jonathan Firth.

The Handan Dream is the final of Tang Xianzu's famous four masterpieces. In the original text frustrated scholar-official Lu Sheng meets an immortal at a rural inn, to whom he complains to about his lack of success in the imperial exams. In order to enlighten him, the immortal gives Lu a magical headrest on which he has a dream of the rest of his lifetime, a fifty-year political career of successes and glories, excesses and failures. Upon waking Lu then discovers he is still in the inn and almost no time has passed at all.

A statement on the transience of human existence and futility of earthly desire and ambition; Lu Sheng sees that the heights of luxury and privilege eventually lead to suffering and disappointment.

In this adaption, events in Lu Sheng's dream are echoed by the characters, themes, plots and lyrics of Shakespeare's plays, creating a dialogue in which the questions of ambition and desire are treated according to the contrasting attitudes and cultures of Elizabethan England and Ming China.