Reads- 2026 NTT Fall for Great Souls

 

Inheriting Greatness

KENG Yi-wei | Adjunct assistant professor of the School of Theatre Arts, Taipei National University of the Arts

 

In the anime Attack on Titan, the power of the Nine Titans can only be passed on when a new Titan consumes the predecessor, inheriting its extraordinary power. Much the same can be said of NTT's Fall for Great Souls series. At first glance, the original classics seem to have been devoured, even erased. Yet what truly endures is their power to transform the world, reborn each time it is inherited and reimagined.

This year's NTT Fall for Great Souls series offers a compelling demonstration of how the classics continue to find new life through dialogue with the present. Shakespeare has long served as a touchstone for contemporary reinterpretation. In his influential Shakespeare Our Contemporary, the Polish critic Jan Kott argued that Shakespeare’s plays continue to illuminate the conditions of modern life.

Irish director Dan Colley's Lost Lear takes an unexpected path, reimagining King Lear through the experience of an elderly woman living with dementia. Through an inventive blend of projection, puppetry, and live video, the production transforms the central father-daughter relationship into one between mother and son, while Shakespeare's profound insight into human nature continues to resonate within the alienation of contemporary life.

Contemporary Legend Theatre's Kingdom of Desire, adapted from Macbeth, was the company's inaugural production and has since become a landmark of intercultural theater. Now, exactly forty years after its 1986 premiere, audiences will not only witness the celebrated partnership of WU Hsing-kuo and WEI Hai-min, but also experience the work as it is carried forward by a new generation through CHU Po-cheng and HUANG Jo-lin, offering two generations of interpretation in a single production.

Innovation in contemporary performing arts rarely emerges in isolation. More often, it finds its inspiration and vitality through an ongoing dialogue with tradition. Norwegian choreographer Alan Lucien Øyen, the first guest choreographer commissioned by Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, brings Europe-based Taiwanese dancer WU Meng-ke into Antigone. Rather than faithfully recounting the ancient Greek tragedy, the work reframes it through a multiplicity of viewpoints. As Øyen himself has noted, these perspectives invite audiences to examine "violence against women, violence in general, and the abuse of power."

Meanwhile, Cie Mossoux-Bonté's The Great He-Goat draws inspiration from one of Francisco Goya's Black Paintings. Blending dance, physical theater, and puppetry, the production gives visual form to the violence, frailty, and helplessness concealed within Goya's haunting late masterpiece.

Nowhere is this reinterpretation of the classics more evident than in contemporary opera. Across Europe and North America, every production of a Mozart opera begins with the same score, yet each staging offers its own distinctive reading. In Laurent Pelly's production of Così fan tutte, the stage becomes an opera rehearsal room. Through its play-within-a-play structure, Pelly preserves the work's comic spirit while inviting audiences to reconsider its age-old misogynistic premise in a contemporary context.

Taiwanese opera, by contrast, is rooted in the tradition of huoxi (live, improvisational performance), a scenario-based approach allows performers greater freedom to improvise rather than strictly follow a fixed script. Tang Mei Yun Taiwanese Opera Company's Phantoms of the Timeworn Mansion explores the history of the Taiwan Cultural Association by departing from conventional historical drama, weaving together supernatural suspense and comedy through a ghost story set in a century-old mansion in Tainan. Ming Hwa Yuan Arts & Cultural Group's The Oolong Empire approaches the rise and fall of Dadaocheng's late nineteenth-century tea empire as a story of commercial rivalry, while tracing the competing ambitions of Zhangzhou and Quanzhou immigrants.

Neither production is built upon a canonical literary text, yet both offer richly layered historical perspectives through their imaginative reinterpretation of pivotal moments in Taiwan's past. In this regard, the postmodern historian Hayden White's revelation of the fictional and rhetorical dimensions underlying historical writing helps illuminate what is truly at stake in reinterpreting the classics. The question is not which version is objectively true, but how multiple, even conflicting, interpretations sharpen our capacity for critical judgment.

If one were to single out the most ambitious reconstruction of history, however, it would surely be Faith, Money, War and Love, Robert Lepage's collaboration with Schaubühne Berlin. Often hailed as the "Leonardo da Vinci of contemporary theater," Lepage is renowned for devising work collectively with his performers. Drawing on the four suits of a deck of cards, he constructs four interwoven narratives of faith, money, war, and love, bringing together characters from the aftermath of the Second World War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the war in Afghanistan, and present-day Ukraine into a five-hour epic tracing the course of modern German history. As always, Lepage's masterful command of multimedia theater allows the stage to transform effortlessly into airports, hotels, and countless other settings, creating an experience of remarkable theatrical virtuosity.

The classics do not endure because they possess some immutable, unchangeable meaning that must remain untouched. Quite the opposite. Their vitality lies in their capacity to invite new, and sometimes opposing, interpretations across different times and cultures. Just as the Laozi has inspired hundreds of commentaries, the Diamond Sutra generations of collected annotations, and Dream of the Red Chamber an entire field of scholarship, so too does theater resist any single definitive way of staging a classic. Every production is a fresh reading, a renewed understanding of the text. However radical a production may initially seem, it ultimately becomes part of the classic's flesh and blood, inheriting and carrying forward its power to transform the world.