The legendary actor and director's career has spanned five decades and seen her win countless awards. Her next goal is to change the way Chinese stories are told
Before dawn on a hot day in mid-July, Sylvia Chang and members of the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra (HKPhil) ventured into the woods, off the beaten path at The Peak. They were there to catch the short-lived, magical sight when the first ray of sunlight pierces through the bushes and trees, creating the illusion of a misty, shimmering fairyland. Unfazed by the mosquitoes, the steamy heat and the bumpy track, the 70-year-old actress, whose work spans Taiwan, Hong Kong and mainland China, looked at ease in her surroundings, like an ethereal fairy queen in her woodland.
This was a photo shoot to promote her latest stage production, A Midsummer Night’s Dream with Sylvia Chang, which comes to Hong Kong this month for the first time, after it premiered in Taiwan seven years ago and travelled to Shanghai in April this year. Adapted from Shakespeare’s comedy about love, marriage, jealousy and magic, Chang’s production is an ambitious undertaking that blends German composer Felix Mendelssohn’s 1826 composition, based on the play, with Chang’s reciting of the characters’ lines in Mandarin.
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When HKPhil’s resident conductor Lio Kuokman was discussing this season’s programme with his team last year, he recalled an archival video of the Taiwan show he watched years ago and had since then wanted to bring the production to Hong Kong. He immediately invited Chang via their mutual friend Yuan-pu Chiao, the translator of Chang’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, to collaborate. “[Chang’s piece] is a fantastic programme that shows the full version of Mendelssohn’s music. Some parts of the composer’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream are very popular, and [surprisingly to some], the Wedding March that we so often hear at weddings” is part of it, says Lio. “But no one really performs the theatrical work in full.”
Not only is Chang putting the full orchestral piece onstage, she is also playing 14 out of the almost 20 characters herself; and in the Hong Kong version, she will add more acting to her performance than she did in the Shanghai and Taiwan productions, where she mostly recited the lines. “I really enjoy working with Sylvia,” Lio says. “She’s an artist who, even if she has done the same piece twice already, treats this production as the first time for her to explore [a new] possibility, and uses her previous experience to refine her work. That’s how a good artist works.”
Chang’s theatrical career started in 2009 with Design for Living, a drama in collaboration with veteran Hong Kong stage director Edward Lam. Since then, she has appeared in a range of stage performances, many of which combine genres including classical music, recitation, folklore and poetry in a single production. Ghosts, in 2020, for instance, where she played 13 characters, combined ghost stories, music and poetry reading in a stage performance, as a way to present the themes of loss, longing and love in a multisensory manner.
“A lot of people think I’m only a storyteller [who recites]. But when I deliver their lines, a distinct image of these characters is visualised in my mind: this character should be big and tall, this person should be ugly, this person is delicate and sweet like a fairy. My imagination keeps expanding,” she says. With A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the number of characters and complex plot make it a “playground” for Chang. “The more you read the play, the more interesting you’ll find the story. You can have many interpretations of one character in this complex setting where love is complicated and everything is a mess before sunrise.”
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