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University of Birmingham students travel to China to perform works by the 'Shakespeare of Asia'

Professor Michael Dobson reflects on a recent trip to China with students, where they performed works by Ming dynasty poet and dramatist Tang Xianzu.

4 November 2025
The group of actors pose in front of Shakespeare statues

From October 22-28 October 2025, one of the many cultural societies run on a voluntary basis by University of Birmingham students found itself making history in China.

Although the Ming dynasty poet and dramatist Tang Xianzu is regarded as ‘the Shakespeare of Asia’, his work is far less well known internationally than is that of his English contemporary.

At this year’s Tang Xianzu International Theatre Month in Tang’s home town of Fuzhou in Jiangxi Province, students from Shakespeare’s own home town of Stratford-upon-Avon, MA and PhD candidates based at the Shakespeare Institute, showed off one way in which Tang might finally crack the Anglophone market.

Four performers on stage

Following on from the rehearsed reading staged at the Institute last autumn during a visit from the translator Prof Huang Bikang of Peking University, the students performed a 90-minute condensation of Tang’s operatic masterpiece The Peony Pavilion in Elizabethan-style blank verse.

The show was directed by Institute PhD student Emily C.A. Snyder of New York, and a characteristically international Shakespeare Institute Players cast included Yueqi Wu (a PhD student from Hangzhou, who played the fatally love-sick heroine Du Liniang), Saul Sherrard (an Irish graduand of the Shakespeare and Creativity MA, as her beloved, the scholar Liu Mengmei), Liberty O’Dell (an American graduand in Shakespeare and Creativity, who played both the heroine’s grief-stricken father and Judge Hu of the underworld, who allows her to return to life), and Kirsty Farrow (a Yorkshire member of the Shakespeare and Creativity cohort, who played the heroine’s confidante Chunxiang, a servant of Judge Hu, and a flower fairy).

Two performers on stage.

Their visit was made possible by the Shakespeare Centre, China, the Shakespeare Institute’s research collaboration with Nanjing University and with Yilin Press. In the intercultural discussions and dialogues which accompanied their performances the students were joined by Professor Cong Cong of Nanjing, the translator Professor Huang Bikang, and the Director of the Shakespeare Institute, Professor Michael Dobson. 

As well as performing in Fuzhou, notably in a packed 800-seat auditorium on the campus of Gandong University, the Shakespeare Institute Players acted their Peony Pavilion at Peking University in Beijing and spoke eloquently at a well-attended pre-show symposium. 

If Tang Xianzu’s plays, hitherto performed only in their native highly stylized musical form, all codified make-up and trembling sleeves, do finally reach the wide international public they deserve, a small University of Birmingham student drama society based in Stratford-upon-Avon will be able to claim some of the credit.

Featured staff

  • Professor Michael Dobson

    Director of the Shakespeare Institute; Professor of Shakespeare Studies

    The history of Shakespeare in performance and in culture; the Royal Shakespeare Company; British theatre history, 1570 to the present; Elizabeth I; amateur theatre; cultural relations between the US and the UK.

    Phone: +44 (0)121 414 9508
    Email:

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