hanghai International Studies University (SISU) students shared experiences in re-creating the play A Midsummer Night’s Dream to celebrate SISU’s 21st Shakespeare Festival from May 17 to May 31. 

Liang Hao, a senior student majoring in translation, was the play director. Liang said the team had faced three challenges in rehearsals — reading the script, preparing props and improving acting skills.

“The language style of Shakespeare’s works is so distinctive that many actors had difficulties in pauses and separating paragraphs,” he said, “We tried to cope with that by asking actors to listen to audiobooks and watch videos from Global Theatre. We also invited professionals to guide them. All the actors finally overcome the problem through repeated imitation.”

Actors were asked to read the Chinese version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Zhu Shenghao to apprehend the characters’ living conditions and backgrounds.

Liu Siteng played Helena. In her perspective, Hermia was crazy but brave and funny. “In other shows, Helena was a beautiful and knowledgeable young woman,” Liu said, “The most important thing was to show how Helena changed from an innocent girl to a woman of simple beauty.” 

The cast made props on students’ own. Chen Yujin, head of the props group, said, “It took us the most time to make the two stones.” Chen added, “We used a kitchen knife to carve stones out of the foam so that the fragments of foam wouldn’t fly everywhere and the edges of stones would look authentic.” 

According to Liang, altogether they spent 1,000 yuan on a piece of 60-meter cloth and 20 lanterns. “Although the expenditure wasn’t high for a campus drama, we managed to build up a quite fantastic setting,” he said. 

It’s the first time for School of English Studies to perform A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Compared with The Merchant of Venice, the classical program of the festival, A Midsummer Night’s Dream posed a greater challenge. “We produced the drama from scratch. In addition, the plots were more complicated with three storylines,” Liang said.