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Kathakali King Lear, presented at London's Globe Theatre in 1999, is a case study in the possibilities and difficulties of intercultural theatre practice. This article uses Bharucha's and Pavis's theories on intercultural theatre to frame its analysis and shows how this production, by a multinational troupe collaborating over ten years, crafied a work that crosses Indian and European cultural borders. Text adaptation, character type assignment, casting, resistance by Indian critics, and refinement of earlier versions are detailed. The ultimate success came as this classical text of Western theatre fused with the physicalization of emotion by kathakali masters. The production illuminated both the Western text and kathakali technique in ways that allowed spectators and performers to experience Lear and kathakali anew, offering a positive model for further intercultural work.
The Indian-Australian-French Annette Leday/Keli Company performed Kathakali King Lear ai the reconstruction of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre on the Thames between 6 and 17 July 1999 as part of the annual Globe to Globe Festival, which features international productions of the bard's work. For the title of this essay, I have borrowed Rustom Bharucha's idea that interculturalism in theatre, ideally, "evokes a back-and-forth movement, suggesting the swing of a pendulum"-an image that Bharucha poses as an alternative to Patrice Pavis's hourglass model "by which the 'source culture' is emptied while the 'target culture' is filled" (Bharucha 1993: 241 ).* For the viewers who were able to see the conventionalized registering of emotion on the performers' faces (bhavas) from the vantage point of the Shakespearean yard, this performance had enormous power. Shakespeare scholar Richard Hornby, for example, found the final scene as "poignant as I have ever seen it, although both actors were so covered in gilt, jewels, headdresses, robes and thick makeup as to resemble porcelain dolls" (Sorgenfrei and Hornby 1999). Viewers like myself who have spent many years researching kathakali were able to see anew the Indian genre we have studied in the choices of character type and story modification, refined through a series of seventy performances over the preceding decade.2 This was a production in which the possibilities of cross-cultural theatre had been maximized, and pitfalls of cultural clash-imperialism, appropriation, assimilation-had been minimized. The result was a model of successful intercultural work, both in terms...