To the sound of strident percussion and martial music, an army emerged onto the stage in a swirl of colourful costumes and flags. The soldiers and generals with their elaborate acrobatic movements drew the audience’s attention to the entrance of Ma Pei, the Chinese Macbeth in the 1986 version. In Chinese productions of the play Macbeth’s entrance is always accompanied by the sound of percussion.

Few transformations of Shakespeare seem to Western eyes as extreme as the transfers into Chinese theatre. Strikingly, most Shakespeare performances in mainland China are of the comedies and romantic plays. Among the few Shakespeare tragedies ever staged, Macbeth has been by far the most performed. The predominant mode for staging Shakespeare is huaju, or spoken drama, a theatrical form devised at the beginning of the twentieth century on the basis of the Western dramatic tradition. However, among the nine mainland Macbeth productions, only three are spoken drama (including a radio play), while six are adaptations into different genres of the traditional Chinese music theatre.

The first spoken drama Macbeth, Huang Zuolin’s 1945 production entitled The Hero of the Turmoil, was an adaptation into an episode from Chinese history. By contrast, the 1980 Macbeth staged by a Moscow-trained director, Xu Xiaozhong, used Stanislavski’s Method and a straight translation of the play, together with costumes and make-up (including wigs, prosthetic noses, false eyelashes and blue colour on the eyelids) that were deliberately aimed at presenting an exotic medieval Scottish setting to the Chinese audience.

While the man in the street is unperturbed at the thought of Shakespeare being performed some 400 years after his death, he is astonished to hear that Shakespeare is performed in Asia (never mind 400 years after his death). Commonality of language, culture, history, country and 'race' conspire to naturalise Shakespeare's otherwise highly 'unnatural' cultural longevity. By the same token, the sheer discontinuity and remoteness represented by 'Asia' exposes not just the longevity of Shakespeare but the workings of cultural value itself. It seems not just strange for Shakespeare to be performed in Asia, but somehow unfit. 'Part of an Englishman's constitution' (as Jane Austen put it), is Shakespeare therefore part of an Asian constitution too?

For a somewhat different reason, the notion of an ‘Asian Shakespeare’ may well seem odd to a Japanese, Chinese or Indian. In terms of what culture in the geographic domain of Asia does ‘Asia’ make sense? No one particular culture, of course. As Edward Said has suggested, ‘Asia’ is a geographic fiction rather than a life world. The difficulty is not got round by substituting the grouping of ‘India’, ‘China’ and ‘Japan’. The very bracketing of these countries bespeaks an implicitly Orientalist standpoint.