The Bard meets a Ming playwright

The play A Midsummer Night's Dreaming Under the Southern Bough features young students from China and the United Kingdom, most of whom are not theater majors. [Photo by Zhu Xingxin/China Daily]

Li Jun, who teaches European and American drama at the Beijing-based university and who co-wrote the script of A Midsummer Night's Dreaming Under the Southern Bough, says it's challenging for Chinese performers to make Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream relevant to a contemporary society.

"We made some changes to Shakespeare's original version from a Chinese perspective. For example, there are two men who love the same woman in the play, but we have two women who fall in love with the same man in our version. It's a way of showing the rise of women in Chinese society, with specific reference to young urban women," says Li Jun.

Director Steve Ansell's journey with the project could be said to have started in Shanghai when he first visited China in 2012.

He first worked in Li Ruru's play The Sun Is Not For Us, which was inspired by Cao Yu, and brought together characters and stories from the playwright's four most-famous theater works in a one-hour production.