Sunday August 24, 2008
To love or not to love?
MOST people get their fill of William Shakespeare’s sonnets in secondary school, but not Christopher Ling.
“Some poems, despite the flowery language, are timeless. They stay relevant forever,” he says.
Ling, together with the T4YP ((Theatre for Young People) ensemble, put together 21 of Shakespeare’s sonnets for Love & Beauty – The Sonnets of William Shakespeare, recommended for “romantic saps” like the director.
“T4YP aims to do one classical production every year, but I didn’t want to do a full-length Shakespeare play, because language is still a barrier. So I decided to work with something a little more subjective – poetry,” says Ling of his decision to work with sonnets.
“Of course, we still had to tackle language, but this way the ensemble were able to each take home a sonnet and work on decoding it and offer their own interpretations. You should see what they have come up with, you’ll be amazed.
“Some of them are set to music, some are portrayed via multimedia and some have been turned into dialogue. If you pay close attention, you’ll realise that one of them isn’t even Shakespeare,” says Ling, referring to Helena Foo’s poetic contribution to the play.
“Love & Beauty is a contemplation of just that – love and beauty, using the immortal words of a man that nearly everybody considers the authority on the subject. We can’t go wrong with that!”
‘Love & Beauty – The Sonnets of William Shakespeare’ runs from Sept 8-21 at Pentas 2, KLPac. For more information, see t4yp.wordpress.com.
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