Shakespeare and the Theatre Broadcast Experience : A View from Hong Kong

For nearly a decade, cinema-theatre hybridity in the form of theatre broadcast performances has captured the imagination of audiences worldwide, not least in the former British colony (latterly British Dependent Territory until its 1997 retrocession) of Hong Kong. Shakespeare, thanks to broadcasts by NTLive, RSCLive, Shakespeare’s Globe and KBTCL ive, has in recent years increasingly become part of Hong Kong screen culture. In this ‘reaction shot’, I will discuss the extent to which aesthetic/artistic criteria for audiences and knowledge of texts in a second or other language are necessarily subordinate to those of actor star-status – which is naturally prominent in the publicity – and a sense of cultural elitism/superiority among Anglophone audiences. The chapter will also interrogate the absence of Chinese language subtitling, as mandated by the city’s trilingual, biliterate public policy, as well as the significance of Shakespeare in the currently charged political atmosphere in Hong Kong.