ABSTRACT
In Shamlet, a play by the Ping Fong Acting Troupe that toured Taiwan and China and that was restaged numerous times between 1992 and 2014, a second-rate theatre company called the Fong Ping Acting Troupe tours a production of Hamlet through cities in Taiwan. Its styles of naturalistic acting differentiated between the actors’ manner, linguistic idiom, and register when they were rehearsing Hamlet and when they performed it live. Conversations when the actors were out of role were even more casual, presenting their “reality” in contrast to Shakespeare’s roles and capitalizing on the fame of many of the actors on television and game shows. As one might anticipate, the lives and relationships of the actors began to mirror situations in Hamlet. With each successive performance of the final scene of Hamlet, the actors’ confusion, caused by their repeated changes of role, brought their performance farther towards total breakdown. At the company’s lowest point in the penultimate scene, the producer of the Fong Ping Acting Troupe, Lee Shiu-kuo (played by Lee Kuo-shiu, the real-life playwright and artistic director of Ping Fong), exclaimed: “the biggest contradiction the Fong Ping Acting Troupe has today is we shouldn’t have staged a play by Shakespeare. What has Shakespeare got to do with the Taiwanese?” Yet the closer the Fong Ping Troupe’s performance came to disaster, the more it showcased the Ping Fong actors’ talents in improvisation and comic burlesque to save the day. The naturalistic acting of Hamlet with which they had begun – modelled on old-fashioned, somewhat tacky Western period drama – was replaced by the mannerisms, wit, and style of humour of Taiwanese popular performance.
