He is one of Asia's foremost theater directors, and Ong Keng Sen looked to be enjoying his latest challenge when we met in Tokyo in March during rehearsals for "Sandaime Richard," Japanese dramatist Hideki Noda's iconoclastic adaptation of Shakespeare's "Richard III."
The Singaporean dramatist was preparing to stage the famously complex play two months later at the annual World Theatre Festival Shizuoka — where, he said, he was intent on pursuing his longstanding focus on what he calls "New Asia" by weaving its multiple realities and hybrid identities through Noda's "machine-gun" Japanese script.
In practice, he was transforming Noda's radical reworking of the Bard's original into a multilingual, cross-cultural and hypermodern play involving Japanese, Singaporean and Indonesian performers trained in different disciplines and traditions.
With your current subscription plan you can comment on stories. However, before writing your first comment, please create a display name in the Profile section of your subscriber account page.