The last 59 minutes had been a disaster. It was supposed to be an English conversation class, but no one wanted to speak. I watched the clock tick towards its destination, then the university bell broke the silence.
After class a girl called Sunny approached; the only time she ever stopped talking was the moment my conversation class began.
“We’re preparing a Shakespeare play for a national competition,” she said. “It is not going well. Can you help?”
“I’d love to,” I replied. “But I don’t have time.”
In England this would have been accepted as a polite refusal. Not in China.
“Great,” smiled Sunny. “I will tell Susan that you would love to co-direct the play with her.”
“Hey!” I replied, “I definitely don’t have time to co-direct.”
“But it will only take two hours.”
“Is that how long it takes to direct a Shakespeare production these days?”
“No, that is how long it will take to correct our pronunciation.”
“Ok,” I conceded, “But only two hours.”
“Great!” she grinned. “The rehearsal is on Saturday. I will send you the details.”
After lunch, I jogged around the athletics track in an effort to clear my frustration. Spending a Saturday with students was the last thing I wanted to do. I was fed up of strange conversations with Chinese people, I hated the way people giggled at me because I was foreign, and I was no closer to understanding the people or the place at all: I felt like I had known more about the country before I arrived.
On the way back to my flat I passed a Chinese teacher called Teng.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Jogging,” I replied.
“At noon?”
“Yes.”
“Is that a healthy time for a jog?”
“I just felt like going for a jog so I went for a jog.”
He put his hand to his forehead in astonishment.
In China, everything a foreigner does is seen as eccentric — even something as mundane as going for a lunchtime jog.
Teng had directed last year’s production of Romeo and Juliet — which had won second place. Quite an achievement, considering the competition involved the most prestigious universities in China.
“I was lucky,” he smiled. “We had some talented students who could sing. This year there is no talent. I was asked to direct again, but it is so much work and I do not have the time.”
“Great,” I muttered, feeling all the frustration I had just cleared return.
The first rehearsal
I waited in the pouring rain by the dilapidated university entrance. Ours was not a prestigious university and the facilities were poor. The potholes were full of water, making it more dangerous than usual for the mopeds that splashed past.
When Sunny arrived, she didn’t apologise for being late. Chinese people are never on time: on occasions I forced myself to arrive late on purpose, but the other person always arrived even later.
Together we trudged to the top floor of the big grey university building.
There was no need to open the door of the classroom because there wasn’t one. No heating either, so it was freezing cold.
Ten minutes later, two other girls arrived. Both had their coats pulled up to their chins and clutched crumpled scripts in their hands. I recognised them from my classes. The first was Daisy; she was tall, angular, and serious. The other was Nicola; she was loud, sarcastic and spent most of the time rolling her eyes.
The director (Susan) arrived last of all. A teacher in her mid-thirties, she wore steamed-up glasses and looked stressed.
“Here’s your script,” she said, thrusting some papers into my hands. “We really hope you can save us.”
“The Taming of the Shrew is a very tiring play,” added Sunny. “So we are not acting properly until we need to. We must conserve our energy.”
With my expectations now at zero, the girls organised themselves into a disorganised line and began to read from their scripts.
Sunny was playing Petruchio; the man attempting to tame Katherine (played by Nicola) so that he could marry her. Daisy played the bit parts (a servant, Katherine’s father, etc).
“Why aren’t there any boys in the play?” I asked Susan.
“Boys aren’t keen to take part,” she replied. “They hate acting and they hate Shakespeare even more.”
When the girls had finished I only corrected their most basic pronunciation errors; otherwise we still would have been there when summer came around.
Once they had left, Susan revealed there were also problems with the script.
“The performance has to be less than twenty minutes,” she explained. “So I selected the scenes I liked and cut bits out of them.”
You’ve been re-writing Shakespeare?”
“Yes,” she replied. “But my version is very disjointed. I’m hoping you can improve it and get it back to me by tomorrow.”
“Me? Why can’t you do it?”
“You studied screenwriting, didn’t you?”
“Yes, about ten years ago.”
“Exactly,” she said, with pleading eyes.
Writing the script
At first I was reluctant to change any of the text: it felt like sacrilege and I agonised over the removal of each word. But as the hours passed I became more brazen, and soon I was cutting and pasting to my hearts content.
By the time I had finished it was morning.
Outside my window some old men were practicing Tai Chi. It would have been a picture perfect image, had it not been for the cars screaming past.
Ignoring the beeping horns, I sat on the balcony and re-read my script.
To say I wasn’t thrilled would be an understatement.
Once you strip a story of its layers, you are left with just the beginning, middle and end. For example in the Taming Of The Shrew, the father arranges for his daughter to marry (beginning), her suitor tames her (middle), and they live happily ever after (end).
In the new script the story was now clear, but I had gutted the play of its texture and humanity along the way.
But there wasn’t time to start over, so I sent the script to Susan and put it out of my mind until the next rehearsal the following day.
This time we met in Susan’s office.
“I liked the new script,” she said.
“Good,” I replied, trying not to think about the horrendous cut and paste job.
“But it’s still too long,” she said. “And there is a monologue that I want to include. So I will edit it once more and send it back to you.”
“Good,” I replied, wondering if the script would be recognisable as Shakespeare by the time we’d finished with it.
The girls then stuttered through a reading of the new script with even worse pronunciation than last time.
“We’re sorry,” said Sunny. “It’s the first time we’re reading most of this because none of us have much time.”
“You’ll have to make time if you want to win the competition,” I replied.
“We won’t win,” Susan interjected. “We just have to complete our task and hope not to embarrass ourselves.”
And on that inspiring note, the rehearsal finished and we went home.
Planning the performance
The following weekend I met Susan for lunch. She had found a cartoon version of the play and transcribed it to create another new script. I wondered if it was the first time anyone would stage a performance of a play based on the cartoon of the play.
Last year’s performance of Romeo and Juliet had included minority songs from the local area.
“Do the girls have any special skills we could incorporate?” I asked.
“They claim they can sing and dance,” Susan replied. “But I do not think they can do it on the stage.”
“Why not?”
“You have seen them. They are not good performers.”
The way she said it was so factual it felt almost comical.
Susan planned to take the girls to Beijing for a Shakespeare masterclass the following weekend — organised by Joe Graves — an American actor and director who nurtured theatrical talent at top universities.
She asked if I would like to come.
“What about the classes I’ll miss?” I asked.
“Don’t worry, someone else can teach them.”
I heard nothing more about the trip or the play until a few days later when Sunny visited me in my office.
She and the other girls had just performed the play for the Dean: apparently he wanted to check it was worth sending them to Beijing.
He had said the performance was vulgar — and neither Sunny nor Daisy were believable as men.
“Do you think I am believable as a man?” Sunny asked.
“I’m not answering that,” I replied. “If I say no you will be upset, and if I say yes you will also be upset.”
Sunny laughed and picked up her enormous school bag.
“I haven’t eaten dinner yet, a friend is bringing me some bananas in a minute. I hope she’ll arrive in time, I only have five minutes before my next class.”
“Why haven’t you had dinner?”
“I am too busy. I have a dancing competition on Sunday, so I must practice for that. I take communist party classes and I must write two essays every day for them. On top of that, there are all my other classes as well.”
She produced a soggy hand-written essay from her bag.
“This has to be handed in now. And look! It has got wet in the rain.”
She stuffed the essay back into her bag.
“I’ve got the Shakespeare play, too – and I’ve had no time to practice, so it’s just getting worse and worse.”
Her eyes welled with tears, “I’m just so tired of it all.”
“Why are you doing all of this?” I asked her.
She thought for a moment, as if no longer sure.
Then she said: “Because my parents want me to be ambitious.”
As I watched her walk out of the door, she seemed even smaller than usual.
The journey to Beijing
I met the girls at the city station to embark on yet another Chinese train journey. All of the girls carried huge bags of food (mainly noodles) to see them through the twenty-three hour journey.
When our train arrived it was already completely full. Getting onto it involved the usual pushing and shoving, with no one willing to queue.
Once on board, it was exactly the same as every other Chinese train: bunk beds, stained sheets, incessant chatter.
The girls spent the first few hours of the journey sharing noodles, jerky and sunflower seeds between them.
After that, they compared their new pollution masks in the same way girls try on ballgowns before a prom.
“What do you think?” asked Sunny, her voice muffled by the mask.
“It looks good,” replied Nicola, who now looked like a doctor.
With their outfits finalised, the girls spent the next few hours complaining about university.
“When I was younger I loved English,” said Nicola. “Last year my motivation dropped a little. And now I have about one centimetre of interest left.”
The others nodded in agreement.
I asked them why they weren’t interested in English anymore.
“We used to think it was useful,” replied Sunny. “But now the government says it is more important to learn Chinese. So we don’t have much motivation for English anymore.”
It wasn’t the first time I had heard this, but it was still depressing. I’m not sure what irritated me more; the notion that Chinese and English were mutually exclusive, or that students were so readily influenced by government policy.
I tried to explain that learning English wasn’t just about passing tests or towing the party line: it was a skill that would make their world a bigger place.
But they didn’t want to hear it, so I gave up and went to bed.
I woke up the next morning to the sound of Nicola and Sunny reciting lines.
Ignoring the litany of errors, I went to the water boiler to make my fourth pot noodle of the trip.
On my way back I found Daisy, who was more shy than the others, staring out of the window. I didn’t want to return to Shakespeare practice just yet so I sat down opposite her.
“What time did you wake up?” I asked.
“Five o’clock,” she replied.
“That’s very early.”
“Yes, but I did not get up until 7am.”
“What did you do for those two hours?”
“I thought about what I should do in Beijing.”
I stirred my noodles and watched the villages drift past the window.
“Do you have any siblings?” asked Daisy.
“Yes,” I replied. “Two sisters. And you?”
“My father left when I was six. After that my mother re-married. They have one daughter, so she is my half sister. I also have a step-brother.”
She stared out of the window, “I want to find my father, but I don’t know which city he is in.”
I looked at Daisy properly for the first time: there were so many students in my classes that I usually saw them as numbers. It rarely crossed my mind that each of them was dealing with problems I knew nothing about.
Getting acquainted with Beijing
It took twenty minutes to fight our way out of Beijing station, and having finally managed it, we became completely lost.
We knew our hotel was near to a bridge, but there were bridges everywhere — and we didn’t know which was the right one. So we spent the next hour picking through traffic with masks over our mouths.
It was early afternoon by the time we found the hotel — and it had not been worth the journey.
The dirty windows of my room looked out onto the polluted main road. The air reeked of cigarette smoke, all of the lampshades were ripped and the cupboards were rotting away.
I didn’t want to spend a minute more than I had to in there, so I dumped my bag and left to have a look around.
Unfortunately it was freezing cold and impossible to get away from the motorway, so my excursion only lasted twenty minutes.
Back at the hotel, the girls had pushed the furniture to the walls to create a ‘performance area’.
Susan was timing the play to see if it lasted less than twenty minutes, which it didn’t, because the girls couldn’t remember half the lines.
As the girls flailed for words, Susan’s face became redder and redder.
Eventually she exploded:
“You are useless,” she yelled. “How can you not know any of the words? You are going to embarrass us all!”
After this, I tried to help the girls with their pronunciation, but they were tired and upset.
Sunny was close to tears because she couldn’t pronounce the letter ‘l’ properly.
“I can’t even say love,” she complained. “If I love someone, how will I tell them?”
“Your pronunciation of hate is perfect,” I told her. “So you’ll just have to tell them that instead.”
She glared at me.
“You know Tom. Sometimes your sarcasm is funny. And sometimes it is not funny at all.”
It felt like we were a family who had spent too much time together.
A Shakespeare masterclass
The next morning we walked to Peking University. The campus was huge — there were lakes, outdoor study areas and a Picasso exhibition.
The foreign language department (the venue for the masterclass) was situated in a brand new building. We entered to find the event had already begun.
At the front of the room, an American (Liz) helped some students with their pronunciation. Joe Graves sat at very the back, surrounded by empty Starbucks cups and chain-smoking Chinese cigarettes. He watched with his arms-crossed — and occasionally loped to the front to make corrections. Not that the students needed much help: some of them spoke better English than me.
“This is what I was worried about,” Susan fretted. “We can’t compete with this. It is going to be so embarrassing.”
She then whisked the girls upstairs to practice, leaving me to “spy on the other groups.”
If anything, the next group were even more professional than the first. There was little to learn from this (aside from that Susan was right to be worried), so I went outside to get something to eat.
Near the university gates I found the girls arguing with a stallholder. They had ordered a huge slice of cake without realising it was sold by weight — now the stallholder was adamant they had to buy it.
Eventually the girls conceded defeat and handed over the money.
With their pollution masks hanging around their necks, they passed the cake around — turning their noses up at the taste.
“We have decided we hate Beijing,” Nicola told me. “It is too big and too cold here. Also, we have just spent all our money on this cake and it tastes disgusting.”
“It doesn’t taste that bad,” I lied.
“Then have some more,” said Sunny, pushing the cake towards me.
“No way, I’ve had my bit.”
After this, we returned to the classroom for the girls to take their turn with Liz. When their time came, they moved to the front of the room and nervously began to read through the script.
Liz looked like she didn’t know where to start. Unlike the other groups, the girls were pronouncing half of the words incorrectly — and some of these were character names.
An hour later, she went over all the pronunciation errors the girls needed to fix before their video submission.
It was a long list, and the girls looked somewhat deflated.
Liz noticed this and smiled: “You have a lot of work to do, but I’m sure you can do it. You really are lovely girls.”
This did little to cheer them up.
Tomorrow they would be performing the full rehearsal for Joe Graves — and none of them felt ready for it.
Rehearsing for the masterclass
The girls spent the evening practicing in the hotel again. The atmosphere was even more tense than the day before: Sunny loudly recited lines to herself, Nicola kept threatening to quit, and Daisy complained that she had received less feedback than the others.
Susan sat at her computer in the corner of the room — and each time she glanced up from her screen she looked more angry. Eventually she lost her cool and screamed at Daisy. In response Daisy went quiet for a moment — then burst into tears.
“I think everyone needs to go bed,” I said.
“They need to get better,” Susan barked.
“Do you want to go to bed?” I asked Sunny.
“No,” she replied, “I just want to be better.”
It felt as if she wasn’t just talking about Shakespeare, but her whole life.
“We’ll explain to Joe that we’ve got some problems,” I reassured the girls. “The performance isn’t supposed to be perfect. We came here to get some help. Isn’t that right Susan?”
She glared at me: “If you think that’s ok, you can explain it to Joe and Liz.”
I wasn’t angry or surprised by Susan’s behaviour; like most Chinese people she was under a lot of pressure. She had never wanted to direct this play in the first place — and it came with a lot of expectations attached.
The day of the masterclass
After three hours of sleep, we got up early to visit the summer palace (even Susan had realised it was a pity to come all the way to Beijing and only see hotel rooms and classrooms).
Unfortunately the weather was so cold that it was impossible to enjoy it (I guess that’s what happens when you visit a summer palace in the middle of winter).
We were walking around the frozen lake when Sunny and Daisy disappeared.
They returned twenty minutes later looking glum.
“We have been scammed again,” said Sunny. “A woman invited us to dress up in the empress’s clothes and take some photos. After we had finished she made us pay a lot of money.”
“And we look ugly in the photos,” added Daisy.
I had to laugh: this was like travelling with a group of aliens who had never left their home planet before.
Later that morning we returned to the campus.
We arrived early and watched a group of students from Shanghai rehearse. Joe came down hard when the students got things wrong — which was exactly what these students needed, but if he treated mine in the same way it would crush them.
During the break I took the opportunity to talk to him.
“Listen,” I said, “My students don’t know Shakespeare so well, and this is all new to them. The standard of their performance might not be so high. Can you do anything to improve their confidence?”
“I’ll try,” he said with compassion. “But I only have an hour.”
Fifteen minutes later, the girls’ moment finally arrived.
This was the first time I had properly seen the play: the girls had always refused to show me the more physical parts because ‘it was too tiring’.
I finally understood why the Dean had thought the play vulgar: Sunny and Nicola spent most of the time rolling around on top of each other. There didn’t seem to be much Shakespeare happening — it was mainly just grunting and wrestling.
“It’s great that your performance is physical,” said Joe. “But it must be precise too.”
To demonstrate, he and Liz took on the roles of Petruchio and Katerina.
During the demonstration, Liz pushed Joe to the floor.
“Be careful,” Sunny warned him. “You might get hurt.”
“Don’t worry about me,” he smiled. “But can you do that?”
“Yes I can,” she replied. “In a more mild way.”
Previously the atmosphere had been serious, but our play had to be built from the bottom up — so there was creative energy and good humour in the air.
“Do you like Katherina?” Joe asked Sunny.
“Yes,” she smiled. “I like!”
“Then we need to see that! Otherwise it looks like you’re just angry with each other all the time.”
To demonstrate he slapped Liz’s ass. She mocked annoyance whilst subtly indicating that she had enjoyed it.
“Do you see what I mean?” Joe told the giggling girls.
He then explained ‘upstage’ and ‘downstage’. After which they kept turning the wrong way so that they weren’t even facing each other when talking.
The hilarity saw us through to the end of the hour.
After the masterclass had finished, I joined Susan and the girls outside.
“We have so much work to do,” said Sunny. “It’s like starting all over again.”
“True,” I told her. “But at least you learned a lot.”
“Oh yes, so much.”
“What was the main thing you learned?”
“We need a master director like Joe.”
Leaving Beijing
The girls had arranged to stay an extra night in Beijing.
“Try not to get scammed by anyone else,” I told them.
“We can’t,” replied Nicola. “We’ve got no money left.”
Susan and I had planned to discuss the style of the play on the train, but we were both lacking inspiration, so we went to sleep and didn’t wake up until we arrived.
The following afternoon I still had no ideas for the style of the play, so I browsed the competition website in the hope that it might help.
A judge’s comment from the previous year caught my eye:
“This year I was very pleased to see a more concerted effort on the part of the teams to ensure that the excerpts from the plays conveyed meaning. Perhaps that sounds a rather low-grade thing to aim for: how about an ambitious new interpretation of the text?
“But in fact ‘meaning’, in the modest, straightforward sense of the word, is something a lot of productions of Shakespeare (even professional, high-prestige ones) often neglect.
“The view seems to be that Shakespeare’s words and ideas are just too difficult and intimidating for modern audiences, and so the most practical approach is just to dispense with them as much as possible…”
Off the back of this comment, I became convinced that if the girls could understand the meaning behind each line it would make their play stand out (even more so than elaborate costumes and expensive sets).
There was just one problem: first I had to truly understand the play myself.
Studying Shakespeare
I had always hated Shakespeare at school — it seemed so old and irrelevant. But now I began to see the wisdom and humour in it.
The more commentaries I read, the more my admiration for Shakespeare grew. How had he had managed it? Writing just one play as involved as this would have been a huge achievement — and he wrote 37 of them.
Three days later, I arrived to class with an armful of papers. The girls sat up front, ready to take notes.
Going through the play line-by-line was slow, but I refused to move on until the girls had understood. If they misunderstood a line then it would misfire — and if they did this a few times the play would lose its meaning.
This was the antithesis to how my classes usually looked: for once it felt like we were working towards the same goal — and I was surprised how much I enjoyed it.
The final performance
I had expected the girls to be on my case all the time, calling at all hours. Instead the opposite happened and I heard nothing for the next ten days.
Eventually I sent a message to Susan. She replied that I was welcome to visit the next rehearsal. It was an odd message, because it suggested there was no need for me to be there — which made me want to go even more.
When I arrived at the rehearsal the girls were too busy to notice, but the performance had clearly changed. It was more organised and the girls understood their roles. I wanted to believe this was down to me, but I knew something else must have happened.
My suspicions were confirmed when Sunny admitted that Susan had arranged a series of sessions with a famous Chinese opera director.
For a moment I felt angry: I had never wanted to be part of this project in the first place — and now I had been kicked out and no one had had the decency to tell me.
But this feeling didn’t last long.
Over the past few months I had come to know these girls. Their hard work was changing them for the better. It was restoring my faith in education. How could I be angry with them for that?
A month later I had almost forgotten about the play entirely. Then I received a link to the girls’ video submission from Susan.
The quality of the set was clean, imposing and operatic. I wondered how they had managed it; there had been no mention of who would design and create the set in the weeks leading up to this performance. Then again, in China everything is always left to the last minute — and miraculously finishes up ok.
The performance itself was similar to the last rehearsal — only more polished. The girls were dressed in Chinese gowns, giving the play additional gravity. It was far better than I ever would have predicted, but it wouldn’t win any prizes. The girls still fluffed some lines, their pronunciation was often off, and they had a tendency to overact.
So there would be no fairytale ending.
But did it really matter?
Probably not.
Shakespeare had reminded me the most important thing is not the ending — but what the characters learn along the way. And in my eyes at least, those girls were never the same again. They moved with the confidence of people who have completed a task that had once seemed impossible.
In return, the girls had also changed me. They had helped me to understand the difficulties Chinese people face and how this plays out in their behaviour. They had treated me not as a foreigner, or a teacher, but as someone they could trust. In doing so they had given me a much better understanding of the Chinese mindset. This was something I had been reaching for ever since I arrived in the country, and, as nothing in China ever turns out as predicted, it felt fitting that these revelations came through the prism of a four-hundred-year-old English playwright.