The pop culture expressed in K24: Shakespeare in chaos

Abstract

K24, first staged in 2005, was built around a story of an ensemble rehearsing Romeo and Juliet. Based on the American TV drama formula, K24 was performed in six episodes, each of which lasted one hour and at the end of which kept the audience in suspense. By using references to Japanese Internet culture and former Taiwanese Shakespearean adaptations, this production appropriated, mimicked, and deconstructed Shakespeare’s text as well as popular culture. The wave of popularizing and localizing Shakespeare began in Taiwan in the 1990s to celebrate the newly claimed freedom and artistic expression of cultural diversity. K24 employed this postmodernist tradition to parody Shakespeare. The Chinese pronunciation of this play title was punned to sound similar to the English word, chaos. The chaos (K24) responded to the consequence of democratization, paying tribute to the interaction of Shakespeare and Taiwan over the past two decades. It also demonstrated the ways in which Shakespeare was negotiated to remain appealing among the young generation in a new era of globalization and glocalization.