International theatre comes to China
Richard Crane and Faynia Williams report from the International Festival of Theatre in China
Tang Xianzu and William Shakespeare met for the first time on the stage of the Great Hall of the People, Nanjing, 16th October 2008. They had both died in the same year, nearly 400 years ago, but this was no problem for Tang who, as China’s premier dramatist, believed in the power of emotion over reason and of love over death. For Shakespeare, it was less easy, not being on home ground, and having to argue (in fluent Mandarin) that life with all its fardels and contumelies was, in the end, preferable to that undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns.
As a debate it went right to the heart of the conjunction of cultures we had come to witness – (Why couldn’t Romeo and Juliet find happiness beyond the grave, like the lovers in Tang’s Peony Pavilion?) – and top minds from around the world would be addressing such questions later. But for now we were celebrating. In a universe sprinkled with stars, the two great playwrights were facing each other ‘with glorious honour and pride’; then came Mei Lanfang, Master of Beijing Opera, and Charlie Chaplin, Master of Comedy, competing in a massed dance of hands, for Mei, and feet, for Chaplin; then came cascades of performers, ballerinas from Russia, acrobats from Greece, welly-boot dancers from South Africa; and finally from the audience, Men in Suits from many nations, who stood before a line-up of veiled figures and on cue revealed the giant Chinese script: One World! One Stage! One Dream! This was China, in its Olympic year, with aerialists and water drummers, martial choreography and massed bands, staging the Grand Opening Ceremony of the 31st Session of the Theatre of the Nations and, in all its millennia of history, the First Ever International Festival of Theatre in China.
We had received our invitations just days before the Festival. As British delegates, we were to join colleagues from the UNESCO International Theatre Institute (ITI), and be ready to see up to thirty-seven plays from six countries and five continents. The Theatre of the Nations had been established by ITI in 1957, and after thirty festivals world-wide, pursuing the goals of ‘quality, plurality and diversity in contemporary theatre’, had gone dormant. This would be the first one for ten years and it was a first for China. There was a lot riding on it. Would the delicacy and antiquity of indigenous theatre be compromised by exposure to the global audience? Or was interaction across the nations, its much-needed kiss of life?
We had been in China ten years before and, at the Brighton Festival 1998, had hosted a talk with a Szechuan theatre company doing a play about the dam on the Yangtze, and its threat to the Three Gorges. We wanted to see how China had changed; how their drama and art were reflecting the change; and with all its diversity and violent history, what it was within the culture that held such a vast nation together.
We landed at Pudong Airport and were ushered onto the space-age Maglev monorail which travels, with almost no one on it, at 431 kph, into town where a car took us to the station. Suddenly, there were people. Shanghai is twice as populous as London and it seemed everyone was on the platform. Yet the train was on time; we had seats and trolley refreshments; there was orderliness in the queuing and friendliness in the carriage. We shared fresh fruit with a man carrying a sack of clothes for sale, who spoke some English. He had been a geography teacher and had quit because of pressure from the head teacher to give high grades to undeserving children. There was no bitterness or regret. This was the way things were and he was now scraping a living, buying and selling children’s clothes.
In Nanjing we were taken to the new International Conference Hotel up in the wooded mountains above the city. There were 18 foreign delegates, from Germany, Bangladesh, Switzerland, Sudan, Finland, Denmark, Japan, Croatia, Korea, Philippines, France, Russia, USA and UK. The shows we were to see seemed as diverse as you could get, from Szechuan Opera to Broadway Musical, Ice Ballet from Russia to Indian Story-telling, Canadian 4D Art and Australian Puppetry to Street Opera from Greece and Physical Drama from Sweden. What linked them was their ability to travel, both across the world and down the centuries and this was analysed and debated in formal symposia, at receptions and banquets, in the bar and on the bus.
In many cases, the Festival was a trade fair showing what individual nations do best. It got interesting when traditions cross-referred and this was the theme of the opening symposium: how exchanges and borrowings across cultural divides can bring dead theatre to life and revitalize production techniques and actors’ training. Thus you have Beijing Opera, not only studied but performed (in English) as part of the Asia Theatre programme at the University of Hawaii; the Bangladesh Theatre Festival stages Shakespeare, Moliere, Chekhov and Brecht not only translated into Bengali, but recreated as Bengali dramas; and just as Stanislavsky techniques migrated to New York and became the core features of the Method, so the techniques of the Japanese director Tagashi Suzuki have now been adopted in the US with ground-breaking effect by director/teacher Anne Bogart.
How one culture can put its stamp on another and bring stark new qualities to a known story, was borne out magnificently in Suzuki’s Cyrano de Bergerac, which most agreed was the hallmark production of the Festival. Rostand’s ebullient drama is here cut through with an icy chill that freezes out both the romance and the comedy. Actors bark their lines, with gestures to match the vastness of the set, followed by blasts of La Traviata and a final absolute and implacable snowstorm.
There was no Verdi in the blockbuster Aida, which headlined the Festival. This was the Elton John/Tim Rice version and Nanjing’s first experience of a Broadway musical. The show’s US/Iraq references – the hero/general was a clean-cut American; Nubia had been invaded on a false premise for its mineral wealth – were probably lost on the Chinese audience; however, the belting of the songs and the vigour of the dancing and the escalation of emotion, brought a thousand-strong standing ovation, even though most of the international delegates were less than impressed.
In among the international shows were a number of Chinese productions and these gradually emerged as the main attraction of our visit; not only the operas and plays, but the sense of China on show, exposed to the response of a foreign audience; and not only in the Festival at Nanjing, but later, more broadly, as we travelled down the Yangtze and spent time in Shanghai.
The image at the outset was of a culture determined to adapt itself to a modern world and stay one step ahead of rapid global changes. The main question that arose was: How does China do it? Other countries of the communist bloc had seen ideology toppled with resultant political vacuum and social chaos. In cultural terms, as in the great swathe of European drama and literature, from the Oresteia, through Hamlet, Henry IV and Lear, to Dostoyevsky and Eliot, the parent had been risen against and overthrown by the child, and a painful and precarious renewal had taken place. But in China, the protest had been suppressed and the paternal government remained secure. Change happened subtly and inevitably without disturbing the political platform and the deep moral certainties that go back to Confucius. Respect of the child for the parent and the subject for the ruler, when it came down to it, were non-negotiable and so policies such as the one child per family requirement, can be implemented with little opposition, and millions can be relocated to new cities on higher ground, so that the Three Gorges Dam can submerge their ancient villages.
But will the discipline hold, now China is emerging as the leading global economic superpower, and a new monied and free-thinking generation is finding a voice? Can China, so vast, enclosed and prone, historically, to terrible inner turmoil, stay cool and expanding yet still anchored to its core beliefs?
The Chinese dramas that unfolded, over fourteen days, like a five-act play, go some way to addressing these questions.
Opening the drama was Butterfly Lovers, from the Zhejiang Xiaobaihua Yue Opera Troupe, an all-women company, turning the tables on the all-male world of Beijing Opera. It tells the story of a girl (Zhu Yingtai) who deceives her father into allowing her to go to the all-male university disguised as a boy, where she meets and swears eternal brotherhood with an older boy (Liang Shanbo, played by a girl). The brotherhood grows into love but ‘a boy cannot marry a boy’, so Zhu, through a series of intrigues reveals the truth of her gender to Liang who then goes to Zhu’s father to propose marriage. However Zhu, in her absence, has already been betrothed to another by her father, and there is no going against his wish. The lovers meet for the last time and are reunited after death, in the clouds. This was a stunningly beautiful and emotional production, veering from a comedy of confused sexual identity, with homoerotic undertones, to a tragedy of doomed love. The most powerful scene, at the end, is also the one where western credulity is strained to the limit. Shakespeare would have had the younger generation defy the parent and elope, and there would have been no happy ending in Heaven. The play boldly challenges, and plays with, the sexual mores of Chinese tradition, but there is no shifting from the Confucian injunction to obey your father, even though it leads to death.
Act Two of our drama was the Shanghai Ballet’s elegant reworking of Wong Ka Wei’s film In the Mood for Love. Starting in pre-war Shanghai and danced to Ellington and Bartok, this was China in decadent western mode, partying blindly into the catastrophe of war. Central was the tall, elastic-limbed, troubled writer, crossed in love, confused and agonized by the collapse of the alien culture that had seduced Shanghai. A national identity had been painted over with the gloss of western fashion, which when stripped away, left nothing to cling to. Present-day Shanghai, we felt, was not so very different from this pre-war image. The old Whore of the Orient had transformed herself into a spectacular, thriving, international city, very much the model of New China. With high-profile banks, western brand-names and a new youth culture, you would think the consumer was king and communism a distant memory. But increasingly in the bitter financial gales, you felt, even in China, all this might blow away. Every street has its beggars – little tragedies on busy corners: a mother laid out as if dead, a child pleading with a plastic cup, a father rocking manically on his knees – and prices are as high as London. When the crunch comes, and the western veneer peels away, what will remain?
On a trip to Shanghai, we went to see the Chinese Acrobats and this was Act Three of the fortnight’s drama: a massively popular tourist circus; physical brilliance, teamwork, confidence and skill, on show for the world to see: mass plate-spinning, synchronized contortions, jazzy juggling with hats, and looping the loop on five roaring motor-bikes in a spherical metal cage. This was the discipline, precision and extravagance that had made the Olympic ceremonies, the signature of the world’s new billion-plus superpower. All the acts of the Acrobats, except one, were performed with broad smiles and a loving rapport with the audience. The exception was two guys, one stocky, one wiry, like father and son, both fiercely concentrated as if their lives depended on it: lifting, being lifted, holding, balancing with absolute mutual respect and trust.
Away from the theatre and the present day, we took time out and visited a garden, laid out 400 years ago in the time of Shakespeare and Tang. It was the Garden of the Humble Administrator in the little town of Suzhou (population 5.71 million), home of gardens, canals and the silk industry, just 45 minutes by train from Shanghai. This was calming Act Four before the final climax of the drama: walking the zigzagging bridges, seeing the pavilions, tea-house, bamboo groves and lotus ponds. Here the green-fingered Administrator would have humbly entertained the important and the mighty in this peaceful heartland of China, formal/informal, highly civilized yet close to nature, reminding you that while England in Shakespeare’s time was circumnavigating the globe and sowing the seeds of empire, China, as ever, was locked in behind its wall, facing threats from Manchu invaders and the painful transition from the Ming to the Qing dynasties; but doing it quietly, with dignity, in pleasant gardens.
The play that sums up the magnitude and delicacy of those times; points to answers to the conundrums of modern times, and slowly rings down the curtain on our five-act Chinese drama, is Tang’s masterpiece The Peony Pavilion. Written in fifty-five scenes, it runs for twenty hours, over four days, veering from broad comedy to erotic dreams, love in the afterlife, necrophilia and a surprise happy ending. Du Liniang dreams of a lover Liu Mengmei whom she has never met, and is so overcome with longing that she dies. In the afterlife, it is revealed that Du’s marriage to Liu (a real life student) is predestined, and she is sent to haunt him. He is so taken with her ghost, he exhumes her body, is arrested as a grave robber and only spared death when his exam results confirm that he is top of his class. We saw only the first three hours but it was enough to tell that the play was rich with humour as well as tragedy, and broke so many narrative rules, making it more akin to A Winter’s Tale, than Romeo and Juliet, with which it was compared at the Nanjing Opening Ceremony. It is also a play that can travel and was famously directed by Peter Sellars in Vienna in 1998 in a shorter version, and in its entirety at the Lincoln Center New York in 1999 where it was condemned by visiting Chinese officials as ‘feudal, pornographic and superstitious’. This ability to enrage as well as entertain, the clash of reason with raging hormones, and the play’s anchorage, despite everything, in the teachings of Confucius – the father’s word is law and it’s only Liu’s academic excellence that saves his skin – make The Peony Pavilion the premier dramatic fable for China today, and Tang a worthy partner for Shakespeare on the world stage. The difference between the two dramatists is in scale and values. The Peony Pavilion is five times as long as a Shakespeare play, just as Jiangsu province (population 74 million) is many times larger than Essex, with which it has recently been twinned, and this mass of Chinese people thrives through being organized within a culture that would never allow a father-figure to be disgraced.
With this understanding in place, China can fly, and as an epilogue to our drama, on our last day in our hotel on the wooded slopes above Nanjing, we found ourselves flying to the top of the mountain, swinging in a chair-lift over the canopy of the trees like superheroes in Crouching Tiger. We were alone up there, except for a baritone singing far below; and further away, someone was screaming. It was a moment to reflect on the continuing drama that was unfolding. As we swung past the procession of empty descending chairs and looked down on the pollution-covered landscape of Jiangsu province, we wondered if anything could survive there. This ghostly murkiness seemed so far removed from the sterling delicacy of Chinese culture. The peonies, butterflies and porcelain were memories of a bygone age, and we called to mind something someone said about the new generation of Chinese theatre audiences: that after decades of brainwashing, they were reluctant to go to traditional Chinese theatre. Even though Mao had banned Confucius, the paternalist attitude was the same, and for the first time in three millennia, the kids were going their own way. And as if to confirm that any opinion on China can be overturned in a moment, when we got to the top of the mountain, instead of being struck by a solitary tragic grandeur, we found the summit overrun with schoolkids (how did they get there?); hundreds of teenagers with cans and candy-bars, as if the mountaintop was the cool place to be.
There is an actress, aged 90, called Fu Huizhen. Her husband Liu Housheng, aged 88, was President of the Chinese Theatre Association. They attended every symposium and performance at the Nanjing Festival and were staying in our hotel. On our last morning, we joined them for breakfast. Anyone of that age, in the theatre, must have lived through extraordinary times, so we asked them to tell us: What did you live through? How have things changed? What does the future hold?
Their answers were modest and touching. They had been sweethearts at drama school in the 1930s. She had then become a successful actress on stage and screen. He had failed as an actor, so became a director, then a critic. Routine, hard work, love of their art and of each other, had seen them through China’s appalling 20th century history, with only one major interruption to their careers during the Cultural Revolution, when Mme Fu was sent to work in the fields for 3 ½ years, and Mr Liu for seven – a critic and director, he was considered more to blame for the direction culture was taking. As leading players at the heart of the ever-shifting world of Chinese drama, they had seen great changes, but none as total as now. They had always been for progress, and throughout their careers had forged links with western culture; but now they felt the basics were being neglected. The old culture had been broken, but a new one had yet to emerge. Commercial pressure was diminishing the quality of theatre and film. The standard of scriptwriting was a critical problem and actors were becoming too dependent on props. Chinese actors had such a wealth of tradition to study and practise. Like growing seedlings in a garden, Mme Fu was now coaching young actors, and the first thing to learn was how to act with the body alone.
We came home with a cautious sense of optimism about China. Rarely in its history had such a cultural change occurred without huge disruption and loss of life. In the past, cultural and commercial invasion by the west, had brought weak government and an opium-addicted people. Now for the first time, China was opening up, of its own accord, both to sport and the arts; was receiving a sudden rush of foreign culture and commerce, and aiming to match it with its own spectacular dramas. ‘What next?’ is the big question, especially with regard to building a new audience. Contemporary Chinese visual art has already stormed into western galleries – Cai Guo Qiang’s savagely modern evocations of traditional scroll paintings, seen at the Guggenheim New York, and The Revolution Continues, China’s shock-of-the-new artists at the Saatchi Gallery in London. New Chinese theatre has yet to make this kind of international impact and time may be running short. Already a Great White Way is about to bulldoze through the crumbling tenements of Beijing to create a westernized theatre district which will be home to blockbuster musicals, such as the Aida we saw. It could be the old cultural imperialism all over again, with schmaltz if not opium to follow, if Tang’s heirs and interpreters do not claim their place and create a theatre art to match the calibre of the visual artists.
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