National Sun Yat-sen University
Red Bull Theater’s Sardanapalus & Global Watch Party Review
By David Lo
Facing a harbor and nestling by lush mountains, National Sun Yat-sen University hosted two events in November that commemorated the bicentenary of Byron’s death, immersing Taiwanese students in the poet’s musings during his voyage to the Mediterranean amid the rhythmic breaking of the waves. The watch party of Sardanapalus held on 29 October in Kaohsiung, along with Professor Li Ou’s guest lecture on Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage two weeks prior, inspired students to imagine sympathetically the passions in the face of downfalls in Byron’s works.
Unlike European readers familiar with Byron’s legend and poetry, most Taiwanese students were encountering his works for the first time, free from preconceptions of their greatness. Two weeks before the watch party, Professor Li Ou, who traveled across the Taiwan strait from Hong Kong, first introduced 70 students to Byron’s stardom in Europe and proceeded to offer an intriguing close reading of the ekphrastic passage about the Dying Gladiator from Canto IV of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Her lecture, through a meticulous analysis of the metaphors, puns, temporal shifts and the use of Spenserian stanza form in the excerpt, shed light on Byron’s Romantic aesthetics, radical politics, and self-reflexive poetics, inviting students to appreciate the visualizing power of his words in depicting the gladiator’s mental strength despite his fall.
The global watch party of Sardanapalus then presented my colleagues and a group of Master’s students with an amusing contrast of an effeminate cross-dressing king. I first offered a brief introduction to the play and highlighted the fascinating biographical parallels between Byron and the legend of Sardanapalus, as well as a review of various metrical feet with examples from the play. Diodorus Siculus’s sensational portrayal of this last Assyrian king, adapted from the e-text edited by Peter Cochran, was circulated before the watch party so that students could see how Byron appropriated this quasi-historical account to construct his own pacifist ruler.
Though challenging, this closet play offered Taiwanese students a memorable first experience of seeing such a work performed on stage and hearing the flow of poetry mesmerizingly recited by an impressive cast. Through the contrasting tones and postures of Sardanapalus (Amir Arison) and Myrrha (Shayvawn Webster), students saw how the Ionian slave in the play could subversively speak more resolutely and confidently than the ruling king. Sardanapalus’s hedonism also reminded students of King Zhou (1075–1046 BCE), an archetypal tyrant in Chinese history who indulged himself in the “Lake of Wine and Forest of Meat” and burned himself when his dynasty ended, although Byron’s Assyrian king prides himself on his pacifism. A student expressed his fascination with the king’s unconventionality, and my colleague Francesca Cauchi had only one word for the cast and the verse delivery— “superb.” Throughout the performance, students pondered how Sardanapalus felt, burdened by a vast and unwieldy empire and a society that expected its king to be fierce and strong. Across cultures and centuries, Byron succeeded in igniting sympathetic imagination of his young Asian audience in southern Taiwan.
