In a city where contemporary trends override traditional fineness, three English majors from the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) are working to instill new life in their performance of a Shakespeare classic.

They are contestants in the Fourth Chinese Universities Shakespeare Festival, an event co-organized by CUHK. Twelve teams of finalists from 30 universities on the mainland, in Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan will present selected scenes from Shakespeare's to entertain the audiences.

The local team will be presenting Antony and Cleopatra, an underperformed play in Shakespeare's repertoire and a tragedy that also utilizes comical elements, noted Julian Lamb, assistant professor, English Department, CUHK.

"Some of the audiences may have never seen Shakespeare performed before. The scenes we selected may come as a surprise," said Lamb. "The play is special in the musicality of its language, as well as its dramatic, physical movements."

For Minna Cheung, who plays Cleopatra, the beauty of the language should deliver the messages of the play and move the audiences, even if some of them do not understand the meanings of the words immediately.

"In Hong Kong, people tend to prefer the contemporary over the traditional, and Shakespeare is hard to understand," Cheung stated. "Yet the performance as an act should make the drama more approachable to the public."

Cheung's teammates, Emmy Chow and Hollis Ngai, also agree that performing Shakespeare is the best way to promote the playwright in Hong Kong. The addition of new elements can also ignite audience's interest in the genre, Chow pinpointed.

"Back in high school, I performed in an interpretation of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night that was infused with the elements in the 1960s and '70s, such as disco music," Chow recalled. "It shows that classic literature can also have a new life."

In his nine months of teaching in Hong Kong, Lamb observed that local people have interest in the great playwright and English literature, but such interest is hampered by a degree of anxiety about the subject.

"A while ago there was a local performance of a Shakespeare play in Cantonese, which my students found very interesting," Lamb said. "It'd be best if performances are used more frequently in class, so students can learn through discussing characterization."

The event will be held from April 7 to 9 in the CUHK. Group tickets for all high school students as well as individual tickets are available for free from the university.

(HK Edition 03/31/2008 page1)