Hurst students take 'King Lear' to China

"Taking 16 Hurst pupils to China to perform Shakespeare was a wonderfully challenging and rewarding experience” explained Nicholas Beeby, Hurst’s Director of Drama. “The challenges began with the script itself and the shape of the production and ended with four bravura performances in China. In between, we all had wonderful fun working out how to organise ourselves as a touring theatre company in a far away country”.

Beeby, Art teacher Helen Clear and 16 Hurst pupils – 8 boys and 8 girls all aged between 14 and 18 – chose to produce and perform ‘King Lear’. “It seemed to us all” said Beeby “that it is one of the more straightforward of Shakespeare’s plots and therefore one that would be most easily understood by an audience whose mother tongue is not English”.

“It was when I shared the script with the lady who had kindly agreed to act as our primary liaison contact” he continued “that the fun began. A teacher of English herself and a great Shakespeare fan, she nevertheless felt that the play in its original form would not be adequately understood and therefore appreciated by our audiences. After a deal of discussion, we agreed that I would shorten the play (by cutting, not by re-writing!) and divide it into four sections. In performance, we began by introducing the characters before providing a short, spoken, summary of what the audience was about to see in the first section of the play. As each ‘part’ of the play finished, we reminded the audience of what had happened and gave them a resumé of what was about to happen! Perhaps not an approach that Shakespearian purists would endorse but the entire touring company was determined to do whatever was necessary to convey the real magic and majesty of Shakespeare; our approach proved wonderfully successful.

“As a touring theatre company, we had to make sure that the show was designed to be as portable as possible right down to the costumes which were specially designed by Kenan Ceylan, the Hurst Sixth former who also produced four extraordinary performances as a powerful and deeply convincing Lear. Every performance was, of course, held at a different theatre and so, in the hours before the audience arrived, the cast were working hard, deciding how best to use the space and how to work with the lights and special effects that were sometimes available and sometimes not. We were all thinking on our feet and working through all the issues that need to be resolved before we could ensure that we would produce the best performance possible that evening; it was a real team effort.

'The four public performances were, of course, the focus of our twelve day tour and the cast were rewarded by hearing pleasing ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ at every dramatic twist and turn and by lengthy standing ovations at the close of every performance. They were treated like VIP’s and were welcomed into the homes and hearts of the Chinese with such warmth that we were all quite overwhelmed.”

Importantly, too, the trip was also designed to immerse the Hurst party in the culture and traditions of China and all had undergone a challenging language course so that they could understand, and communicate at a basic level in Mandarin. For their first five days, the pupils were guests of Suzhou High School in South West China's Jaing Province, where they boarded alongside Chinese students and attended lessons at the school. The teachers devised a programme specifically for the Hurst children including lessons in Kung fu, calligraphy, Chinese cooking, Mandarin and, of course, the Tea Ceremony. “Each pupil then stayed with a local Chinese family for the weekend before the party took the night train (“quite swish” commented one student as she clambered into her bunk and spotted the tv screen) to Beijing where “unexpectedly, after all the publicity surrounding the Olympics and air quality” said Mr Beeby, “the air was clean and the sky a brilliant blue".

There, (in addition to another successful performance of ‘Lear’), the party visited a range of sights from the Summer Palace, the quite extraordinary Forbidden City, took a walk along the Great Wall and enjoyed visited the Hutongs – an area of traditional Chinese low rise, high density homes – where they were invited to lunch. “The most moving moment” said Mr Beeby “was when we visited Tiananmen Square. Our excellent guide felt unable to tell us about the square’s recent history which was quite understandable but of course our children knew about the terrible events of 1989 and we all took a moment for quiet reflection.”

Finally before the party left for home they visited Shanghai (often described as the showpiece of what is still ‘the world’s fastest growing economy’), now an extended metropolitan area of some 20 million inhabitants on the mouth of the Yangtze river. “Our visit to the Shanghai Museum - with its 120,000 or so precious works of art - was a quite extraordinary experience that we were simply not prepared for” said Helen Clear “and at the other end of the cultural spectrum we saw the Shanghai Acrobatic Troupe whose performance simply ‘blew us all away’.”

“Our tour party have been great ambassadors” commented Hurst Headmaster, Tim Manly “and you can see immediately that every student has returned with a heightened sense of personal confidence; each has achieved much and learned much. I believe, too, that we have made a contribution to our hosts’ understanding about our culture. It’s fascinating (and in a way counter-intuitive) to learn that drama and the arts in general are not particularly highly prized in the Chinese educational system so the fact that we toured with a very professional Shakespeare production sent out a real message about our values. Further, many comments throughout the tour focused on how at ease our students are with each other and how closely and imaginatively they worked together. Students in China tend to conduct themselves in a more traditional way and the way in which the Hurst students worked as a team was, we were told, very impressive indeed.”

On their return to the UK, the tour party repaired to the College's Bury Theatre where, for three evenings and to packed and appreciative audiences, they offered the full 'Lear'. "It was," commented one impressed visitor "a tour de force peformance by every single member of the cast".