Shakespeare Institute has 'A Date with Lu Yu'

The Shakespeare Institute became a prime location for one of the most popular television chat shows in China on 28 June 2012 when the star and crew of ‘A Date with Lu Yu’, accompanied by the British Ambassador to China, Sebastian Wood, arrived in Stratford to film part of a one-hour special about Mr Wood’s country and its culture. 

Lu Yu, who extensively modelled one of her famously elegant outfits all over the Institute’s garden, interviewed the Director of the Institute, Michael Dobson, about Shakespeare’s life and influence while walking around the town; meanwhile members of the Shakespeare Institute Players were filmed rehearsing a scene from As You Like It. 

Professor Dobson then coached Lu Yu and Sebastian Wood in the reunion scene between Viola and Sebastian from the last scene of Twelfth Night; it has to be admitted that they did not look much like twins and that Lu Yu was hardly dressed as a page, but she certainly made a poised and poignant Viola, and the Ambassador himself, the son of the late Royal Shakespeare Company star actor John Wood, has been playing Sebastian with reasonable conviction for years. 

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