The first Hong Kong International Shakespeare Festival (HKISF), organized by the Tang Shu Wing Theatre Studio in 2024 with generous funding from the Hong Kong government, was billed largely as an East-West cultural exchange, raising concomitant issues of internationalism and mobility in the post-pandemic era. The festival line-up included an all-female theatrical production of Tang Shu-wing's King Lear (Hong Kong, Romania), an all-male Sardinian language production of Macbeth (Italy), a one-man production of Henry V across the Henriad (Australia), a co-created dance-drama production on Lady Macbeth (Italy, Hong Kong) and a humorous Korean clown adaptation of Hamlet (South Korea). In particular, the distinctly non-verbal productions of King Lear and Lady Macbeth raised the prospect of improving Shakespeare’s accessibility across Hong Kong’s language and educational divide, as well as the creation of a theatrical ‘safe space’ to better mediate the territory’s fraught socio-cultural environment. In this paper, I consider the extent to which these two co-created and cross-disciplinary productions navigate the ‘glocalizing’ imperative of the HKISF and, given the uneven dissemination of Shakespearean theatre across the world festival circuit, Tang Shu-wing’s attempt to bridge the dynamic between a large, well-funded ‘destination’ festival and the smaller-scale ‘community’ festival. These issues tie back to Shakespeare’s legacy in postcolonial Hong Kong, his contemporary reception across different language audiences, and amid ongoing attempts to reinforce the cultural projection of Hong Kong as China’s most ‘international’ city.

Jason Eng Hun Lee is a creative writer, scholar, performer and community advocate whose research and practice fields encompass postcolonial and diasporic Asian writing, global Shakespeare, performance studies and creative pedagogy. His articles have been published in Textual Practice, The Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Wasafiri, and Shakespeare. His poetry collection includes Beds in the East (2019) and he is co-editor of Where Else: An International Hong Kong Poetry Anthology (2023). He serves as literary editor for Postcolonial Text and is chief organizer of OutLoud HK 隨言香港, Hong Kong’s longest-running poetry collective. He is a Senior Lecturer in English and Comparative Literature at Hong Kong Baptist University.