Using Performance to Strengthen the Higher Education Sector: Shakespeare in Twenty-first-century Vietnam

Writing from a Western, Anglophone context, Andrew Hartley argues that ‘university production … is a crucial index of what Shakespeare has become’, since productions manifest and shape the ‘ideas about Shakespeare which the audience, cast, and crew subsequently t[ake] out into the world’. This article uses Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) Open University’s production of Shakespeare, and its context within the wider Vietnamese Shakespearian scene, to explore ‘what Shakespeare is’ in twenty-first-century Vietnam, from the creative industries to higher education. In doing so, it redresses two gaps in the existing literature. Firstly, Shakespeare studies scholars have ‘mainly ignored the Shakespeare going on right under our noses’ – that is, university productions. Secondly, Judy Celine Ick writes that Southeast Asia is overwhelmingly absent from the construct ‘Asian Shakespeare’. It is, in any case, a construct that often assumes and reinforces ‘essentializing notions of Asian collective identity’ – Asian homogeneity – as Yong Li Lan has shown.