British actor Terence Wilton remembers vividly when he first visited China with the stage play Hamlet in 1979, the young actors and actresses he traveled with were so excited that they "kissed the ground" upon arrival.
Forty-five years later, the 81-year-old actor revisited the Chinese mainland to tread the boards once again as a judge in the new theatrical adaptation of the Agatha Christie thriller And Then There Were None.
As the nearly-three-month China tour of the original London West End play drew to an end last week, Wilton shares with Xinhua that his two visits felt like drastically different "spectra".
During the tour, 68 performances were staged in 13 cities from May to July, attracting over 60,000 attendees and captivating Chinese theater enthusiasts as well as Agatha Christie fans with its intricate plot and authentic British flair.
Among the 13 cities, Beijing and Shanghai registered the highest attendance. Each performance in Beijing had an average audience of over 1,400 people and Shanghai's 1,800-seat theater registered an average attendance rate of over 92 percent.
Wilton says of his second visit: "The excitement for me was that I had not only been to Shanghai and Beijing before but with the first foreign production that had ever been allowed into China since 1949, which is an enormous privilege."
As China's reform and opening-up began in 1978, the rare chance to play a Shakespearean character on a Chinese stage was an unforgettable chapter in Wilton's career.
"We must have performed Hamlet to more people in one night than was ever witnessed for a Shakespeare production," he avers.
The visit to Beijing and Shanghai in the winter of 1979 when Hamlet was staged left in his mind lingering images including "everyone in cotton-padded uniforms, in green, blue and gray", "the coal-fired cities", "people cycling in millions through the city", "everything being carried by hand or in handcarts or on bicycles", and in particular, people using the streets of Beijing as refrigerators for Chinese cabbage.
"The China we've come across this time has astonished us," says Wilton of the architecture and the vast number of electric cars and scooters on the streets.
However, what impressed him the most this time was the young and "very intelligent" Chinese audience "who all speak wonderful English". The audiences in China are extremely young, Wilton says.
"It seems they asked very intelligent questions about the play and the book, and they seem to have read Agatha Christie," says Wilton. "That has been enchanting."
What remains unchanged is the warm welcome he received. "What I would emphasize is we've had as warm a welcome now as we had then. We were incredibly well-received and treated as we had been in 1979," Wilton says.
The British actor recalled his friendship with the late translator and performance artist Ying Ruocheng, who was among five Chinese actors who did the character voices in Beijing back in 1979. "He was with us throughout the trip and we became great friends."
This time, Wilton visited the prestigious Beijing People's Art Theater to revisit the stage where he performed in 1979 and was received by the president of the theater Feng Yuanzheng. "I was astonished by the reception I had by the director who came out of rehearsals to meet me," says Wilton.
He was given a book by Feng with photographs from the Hamlet production, including group photos and photos of the banquets and activities they attended during the 1979 visit. "I wept a little bit," the British actor says.
Wilton was especially delighted to be accompanied by his wife Lucy Tregear during their China tour this time, who costarred in the play as the female butler Georgina Rogers. She attended a meet-and-greet event with fans in Hangzhou, claiming it is the one thing she loves about China.
"At the end of every show, when we turn back for photo opportunities with the audience, every light from every phone comes on. It was like looking into the night sky," says Tregear. "I have performed in different countries around the world, but I've never experienced that."
