There was Shakespeare reciting and kung fu fighting

I just went to see a Chinese version of Twelfth Night which was the coolest. Thing. Ever. It was on an invite from a friend who is of Chinese-Cambodian stock, so she was able to tell me and her other friend - we were the only two Caucasians in the whole theatre - that not only did they translate the Shakespeare into Mandarin accurately, they even got it to rhyme. The exception was words like 'him' and 'her' - apparently no such words exist in Mandarin and gender is implied by conversational context.

And there really was kung fu fighting, made even more cool by the fact that it was totally taking the piss out of kung fu fighting scenes. The costumes were mostly Chinese dress and the entire cast was speaking and singing in fluent Mandarin, with subtitles in both English and Mandarin. The sets were pretty culturally neutral though there were references to Chinese tea houses. None of it seemed at all out of place or wrong; it probably helps that I never got a clear fix on where Illyria was supposed to be when I read it back in Year Twelve. Oh, and they made Antonio a very campy gay man with a hopeless crush on Sebastian. It's not the interpretation I made way back when, but it worked really well - he completely stole the show.

I really have to see more plays. I've avoided them for too long because I worry that they'll be too difficult to follow with my sight and hearing, and I've only ever bothered trying on the odd occasion. Tonight showed me that if I'm in front row centre, I can cope pretty damn well.

Note to self: dig up the list of captioned plays running somewhere in Melbourne.