Shakespeare sonnets adapted for the stage in a collaboration where actors helped write the music
- Lines from Shakespeare’s poems in Cantonese, Mandarin and English, set to music, invite audiences to project their feelings onto them rather than tell a story
- Ata Wong, who wrote the play, #1314, says one feeling he wants it to inspire is hope, after recent difficult years in Hong Kong marked by ‘dramatic conflict’
There is a scene in Shakespeare-inspired drama production #1314 in which a man sings gently about his love for a woman while standing directly on her supine body. It is one of many moments in the stage adaptation of the Bard’s sonnets that speak of the inevitable coexistence of beauty and ugliness in love and in life.
This work for Théâtre de la Feuille by its founder and artistic director, Ata Wong Chun-tat, was premiered in the Chinese capital, Beijing, five years ago, but the physical theatre group has adapted it for performance in the Jockey Club New Arts Power festival in Hong Kong, with local lyricists including Chow Yiu-fai translating some of the sonnets – 14-line poems – into Cantonese to be sung together with lines in English and Mandarin.
When Shakespeare wrote “For canker vice the sweetest buds doth love, and thou present’st a pure unstained prime” (Sonnet 70), he was writing about the darker aspects of love and messy human emotions that are universal, Wong says.
That cynicism is reflected in the numbers that Wong has picked for the title (there is no Sonnet 1314). When read in Mandarin or Cantonese, the numbers are a pun on the Chinese phrase meaning lifelong commitment. The hashtag turns a romantic declaration into a social media performance.
Describing #1314 as a musical, Wong says the final product is the fruit of a collaborative process that began in 2016. Back then, he was hoping to find answers to the meaning of love in Shakespeare’s sonnets. In the end, he realised that the words represented feelings, not logic, and asked the lead performers to help compose the music based on their own experiences and how they react to the words.
