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A reworked play of Shakespeare's well-known comedy A Midsummer Night's Dream will start its Asia and Russia tour in mid-September.
Shakespeare's Globe said on Tuesday that Janie Dee, the double Olivier Award winner, and Aden Gillett, an actor of high reputation in Britain, will play Titania and Oberon during the tour.
Directed by Dominic Dromgoole, the reworked play based on the Globe's award-winning 2013 version, which portraying a story that happens among four young Athenian lovers, a group of amateur actors and fairies inhabiting in the forest. Those people are manipulated by a mischievous sprite's love flowers juices, leading them love the wrong person. However, the topsy-turvies are finally fixed, and those people who involved are just told nothing but a dream.
As one of the most popular plays for the stage of William Shakespeare, Dromgoole said this would be the first time that he would take his work and the team of Shakespeare's Globe with more than twenty members abroad. "There are all highlights (in the play) ," the director said.
After staged in two theaters in Britain, the play will make its debut in Shanghai Oriental Arts Center from September 19 to 21, and then continue the performance in Hangzhou, Guangzhou and Taiwan.
The troupe will play in Russia and Singapore from October 15 to November 16.
And after a short rest, the players will return to China and perform the classic show for the audiences in Hong Kong and Beijing.
To make sure that audiences in different countries could experience the original feeling as watching and sitting in the Shakespeare's Globe Theater on the Thames, the stage of the theater will be replicated in those modern theaters with the iconic pillars, balcony and hand-painted detailing.
"This is the first time we take one of our big shows to the Chinese mainland, and for the first time play my show there," said Dominic Dromgoole.
"We hope this is the beginning of a collection of relationships, because we hope that we start conversations that Chinese theaters can bring works here and we can go more regularly to China. I think the stories of Shakespeare are quite young in China, people are still discovering the stories of him, they're still seeing his plays as fresh, but there are so much enthusiasm and so much passion for Shakespeare, we feel that will be great for us to a be part of that conversation," he added.
"Undoubtedly, I think it's very important that the plays, music, literature, art and travels between peoples, because it's an exciting way to encounter other minds, and to understand different people," Dromgoole said.
Shakespeare's Globe is a reconstruction of the Globe Theater, a playhouse originally built in 1599. The original one was destroyed by fire in 1613, while the modern one was built based on available evidence of the old one and opened to public in 1997. It attracts a large number of visitors from all over the world to watch Shakespeare's plays every year.
