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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.
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.
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