Issuu

Shakespeare on the

University Stage E DI T E D BY

Andrew James Hartley

Shakespeare on the University Stage Edited by andrew james hartley

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University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107048553 © Cambridge University Press 2015 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2015 Printed in the United Kingdom by Clays, St Ives plc A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Shakespeare on the university stage / edited by Andrew James Hartley. pages cm ISBN 978-1-107-04855-3 (hardback) 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616 – Dramatic production. 2. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616 – Stage history. 3. College and school drama – History and criticism. I. Hartley, A. J. (Andrew James) editor. PR3091.S3666 2014 792.90 5–dc23 2014023804 ISBN 978-1-107-04855-3 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

6 Ideology and student performances in China lee chee keng and yong li lan

This chapter examines a kind of student Shakespeare production speciﬁc to mainland China that is performed in Chinese translation by the elite, specialist drama academies instituted after the founding of Communist China.1 We focus on the academies’ contemporary productions from 1980 to the present day, with the aim of investigating two clearly different kinds of student Shakespeare that have become distinct since the 1990s: the orthodox and the experimental. The orthodox approach is represented by Xu Xiaozhong’s Macbeth in 1980, when performance of Shakespeare was re-emerging after the artistic vacuum of the Cultural Revolution (1968–78). During the previous decade, training in the academies had ceased and performances of all plays except the 8 Model Operas were forbidden. After time had practically stopped in art for a decade, it rushed forward in a time tunnel formed like the down-swing and upward swoop of a rollercoaster. Student production in the xin shi qi (‘new era’, the decade after the Cultural Revolution) was caught at the bottom of this loop. The founding mandate of the academies’ role in cultural policy compelled their efforts to recuperate the aspirations and ideals of the early 1960s in their formal training and its ideological rationale. At the same time, the academy training of an artistic elite was at ground zero in 1980 after the Cultural Revolution, when it was necessary to begin again the project of a new drama for a new China. The productions compulsively looked backward and forward with equally strong drives. To use a different metaphor, they were caught in a mise-en-abyme in time, where copies of remembered past productions, and projections of the future China, reﬂected one another. The second production we consider is thirty 1

There were also productions in English by the missionary schools in the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century, and English department students since the 1980s.

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years later, Gu Yi-An and Robert Drafﬁn’s Love, Desire, Power (sha shi bi ya de ai yu quan se), which took an experimental approach to Shakespeare and resisted ideological meaning. These two productions contrast the contexts of student Shakespeare production in Beijing and Shanghai.

Appearing western Xu Xiaozhong’s production of Macbeth, at the Central Academy of Drama (zhong yang xi ju xue yuan) in Beijing in 1980, was the first Shakespeare production to be presented by a drama academy after the Cultural Revolution. Looking back at this production now, from a vantage point outside China, its most striking aspect is the way it performs a western performance of Macbeth. The actors wear lightcoloured, curly-haired wigs and prosthetic noses, and as a consequence do not look ethnically Chinese – although they don’t quite look Caucasian either (see Fig. 6.1). Except for Macbeth, their costumes are distinguished by soft pastel colours. The male characters are mostly in tunic and hose, with the notable exception of the king who wears a long robe and coat; the female characters are dressed in western gowns. Before Act 3,2 Macbeth wears a red tunic, black close-fitting (hose-like) trousers and black boots, with a broad gold necklace and belt. Lady Macbeth has long blond hair, wears a baby-pink gown with a train and red trimming, and diamonds at her neck and wrists and on her head. Both men’s and women’s costumes are sometimes made more formal by cloaks, which allow them to make elaborate flourishes, bows and curtsies. The costumes are prominently trimmed with metallic thread and jewellery that signify their characters’ social status, as well as Shakespeare’s cultural status. Renaissance tunes played on wind instruments are heard during scene transitions, and trumpet sequences announce the entrances of the king. The style reminds us that Shakespeare is often referred to in Chinese as Sha Weng (Elder Sha), a name that shows the high esteem in which he is held.

All scene and line references from Shakespeare’s plays are referenced by their equivalents in the original English text, using the Riverside edition, instead of the Chinese translation actually spoken on stage (The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, 2nd edn (Boston: Houghton Mifﬂin, 1997)).

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Figure 6.1 Macbeth by the Central Academy of Drama, directed by Xu Xiaozhong (Beijing, 1980).

This performative imitation of the western stage metatheatrically enacts a relationship to the West, as represented by Shakespeare. But it is difﬁcult to assess a relationship that consists in a mirror image, reﬂected in earnest and not in parody. Does this visual and musical style represent an imagining of western culture through the reproduction of a traditional stage performance? Is the Chinese production of that imitation shaped by a critique of western culture? Or is it an attempt to learn and introduce western theatre through its corporeal forms? Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of this style is its obvious staging of social class and heritage culture within a communist nation at the point when it has just emerged from a decade-long movement that attempted to radically eradicate class and inherited forms.

Soviet realism in 1980 In 1980, this imitative style of western Shakespeare on the Chinese student stage was not performative of a contemporaneous relationship

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to western culture. Rather, the style tells a story of the last thirty years of Communist China’s history, by returning to a point when China’s ideological relationship with a ‘western’ country formed the foundation of its theatre training. When the communists came to power and founded the People’s Republic of China in 1949, all aspects of culture were subjected to political guidance. Driving the strict censorship was the Communist Party’s commitment to supporting culture in order to make full use of it. Both hua ju (spoken drama) and theatre companies specializing in local opera genres were reorganized into state-run companies under the leadership of the Party and the Communist Party government in each region. Almost immediately after being installed, the government assigned ‘revolutionary artistic-workers’ (who had worked in the People’s Liberation Army) to organize drama and film academies in Beijing and Shanghai. The establishment of the academies represented a fundamental decision to develop hua ju and the film industry. Subsequently, theatre and cinema in China have been dominated by these three institutions: the Central Academy of Drama in Beijing, the Shanghai Theatre Academy (shang hai xi ju xue yuan) and the Beijing Film Academy (bei jing dian ying xue yuan). These remain the primary source of training and professionalization for the theatre companies. The academies were tasked with training the talent required to form the vanguard of a new drama for a new China. Their curricula still consist only of conservatory-type training and political thought (Marxism–Leninism and the political theories of each generation of modern Chinese leaders). As part of centralized national planning, graduates used to be posted to key positions in theatre and film production companies nationwide to form the backbone of the cultural and artistic front. Given the unique position these academies occupied within the overall schema of cultural-political planning, their productions were, and still are, perceived and received more like professional productions than campus productions of other universities. Audiences then and now would include the usual friends and families of the students, but importantly also experts and relevant government officials. These productions also attract press coverage similar to that accorded to renowned professional companies. The academies’ productions often enjoy more resources and preparation time than professional productions, and are treated as research and development projects. They thus had more freedom to perform western classics during periods of heavy state censorship.

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In the 1950s, ‘Soviet experts’ were invited by the Chinese government to teach in one of these three institutions in order to assist in developing modern theatre. The Stanislavski system was firmly entrenched by the Soviet teachers and has remained the sanctioned technique for hua ju, which is still given priority and prominence over other schools of acting and directing. A primary approach adopted by the Soviet experts was to demonstrate the application of the Stanislavski system by directing plays on the Chinese stage; they chose Shakespeare’s plays along with Russian classics like Chekhov. Thus, the Soviet experts established the use of Shakespeare in drama education, a tradition that even now remains in place. Their influence was developed and disseminated through the two prestigious drama academies, which have therefore played the key role in staging Shakespeare by regularly including Shakespeare in their graduation productions. Xu’s Macbeth takes its place in this tradition of academy productions that are considered to be the best Shakespeare productions. The Stanislavski system represented a modern drama form as compared to traditional opera genres, whose plots, role-types and fables were associated with the feudal society. Instead, hua ju was expected to address contemporary Chinese concerns and examine Chinese social issues directly. The realist mode was understood to combine artistic and ideological ideals in the mantra that drama school teachers drilled into their students: ‘the true, the noble and the beautiful’ (zhen, shan, mei). This maxim has become internalized to the point that it is accepted as an artistic ideal without awareness that it refers to Hegel’s lectures on Aesthetics. The maxim necessarily implies that hua ju was seen and utilized as a powerful propaganda tool. While reflecting and highlighting social issues, it would also position the communist characters in the positive light of ‘the true, the noble and the beautiful’. The unique position of the Stanislavski system was ideologically driven by China– Soviet relations just after the founding of Communist China. As a relatively young communist state, Communist China looked to the Communist Soviet Union as a guiding example. Ying Ruocheng (1929–2003), a renowned actor in the Beijing People’s Art Theatre (bei jin ren yi) and Vice-Minister of Culture from 1986 to 1990, recalled in his memoir: The first Soviet expert to arrive at our theatre in 1953 – Boris Kulinev – was a truly great actor, and he was the head of an acting school in Moscow. At that

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time, all the actors were eager to know more about Stanislavsky’s method as it was used in the USSR. Kulinev had an entire acting system based on Stanislavsky that took about six months to learn. He stayed at our theatre for three to four years, during which time he led many workshops for us and for the Central Academy of Drama. Those were the honeymoon years between the USSR and China. And I would say that most of our best senior actors from the Beijing People’s Art Theatre went through Kulinev’s training.3

Following the Soviet experts’ models, the majority of hua ju Shakespeare performances in China remain to this day dominated by an intricately realist but cumbersome scenography: grand scenery of a type depicting the Renaissance, with high pillars and broad arches, artificial make-up with prosthetic noses and wigs, and luxurious costumes. Xu’s staging strategy for his Macbeth adopted this orthodox approach in its costume, make-up and music. However, his set departed from the Soviet model performances. Xu abandoned the elaborate and spectacular stage designs customary in Soviet-influenced productions. In front of the black velvet backdrop, there was a huge, abstract and flexible set comprising two raised wooden platforms and three colossal movable cubes. Each platform had steps surmounted by towering pillars and dark-coloured flats. The set sometimes suggested the castle and sometimes the vast and bleak wilderness. The three cubes were moved around to change the scene. In some scenes they appeared to substitute for the witches when they were not physically present. This design accentuated a strong colour contrast of red and black. Xu can be seen as a representative of the first – and last – generation of theatre directors fostered by the state to create a new drama for the New China. Born in an ordinary railway clerk’s family, Xu went to Nanjing, then the capital city, and enrolled in the National Drama School (guo li xi ju zhuan ke xue xiao) in 1947. He joined the Communist Party a year later. He was sent to the USSR from 1955 to 1960 to study directing at the GITIS Institute (A. V. Lunacharsky Institute of Theatrical Arts), where one of his teachers was Yuri Aleksandrovich Zavadsky (1894– 1977) and Jerzy Grotowski was one of his peers. Xu studied the Stanislavski system thoroughly, but he aspired to define a new 3

Ruocheng Ying and Claire Conceison, Voices Carry: Behind Bars and Backstage during China’s Revolution and Reform (Plymouth: Rowman & Littleﬁeld Publishers, 2008), p. 134.

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vocabulary by integrating Stanislavski and Chinese indigenous theatre to create a new style of hua ju with a strong Chinese national awareness. His 1980 Macbeth was the first demonstration of his concept of modern theatre in China. His set design illustrated this concept by maintaining a significant presence on stage (unlike the minimal set of traditional Chinese opera), but not being strictly realist, taking on instead a more symbolic quality akin to the set in Chinese opera. Yet twenty years had passed since Xu returned from his training, and the New China for which he had formed his concept of modern Chinese theatre, and which in turn had supported that concept, no longer existed. The aspirations vested in the maxim for realist art, ‘the true, the noble and the beautiful’, did not fit the socio-political realities that both practitioners and audiences had experienced in the intervening years.

Acting styles and the dramatization of social class To a spectator accustomed to western realist performances of Shakespeare, the Soviet-trained model of realism employed in Xu’s Macbeth recreates early twentieth-century conventions of acting and staging English Shakespeare that appear mannered and old-fashioned by current western norms of naturalism. However, this production cannot be watched simply in terms of an outdated set of conventions. The performative relationship of realist conventions to reality in Chinese theatre is ontologically distinct from the spectrum of realist acting practices in western theatres, since here the ‘reality’ being imitated is itself a performance that is ethnically, culturally and theatrically remote from the contexts of production. The Chinese language spoken by the actors keeps in view the artifice of a western stage image, where reception of the verbal (Chinese) and the corporeal (visual, musical and gestural) dimensions of the performance are misaligned. In this situation, their performance presents a kind of acting of acting, rather than the acting of lived experience. Furthermore, since Chinese performers had at the time little opportunity to watch western performances, much of their imitation of western realist acting was learnt from early Soviet films; by the 1980s, Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet (1948), dubbed in Mandarin, was regarded as exemplary. Aspects of the directorial and acting style of Xu’s Macbeth were influenced by cinematic conventions. From the viewpoint of audiences familiar with Chinese theatre, other features of the production are foregrounded; for instance,

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it is evident that Xu’s adoption of the orthodox grand realist style for his Macbeth during the xin shi qi was modulated by the symbolic and allegorical aesthetic principles of traditional opera. The banquet scene of this performance provides a prime example of this mixture of elements drawn from the Soviet realist model, traditional Chinese opera and western films – the last made particularly evident by the medium of the video-recording on which our analysis is based. The scene begins by introducing Renaissance courtly music, with disjunctive abruptness, into the darkness in which we have just heard Banquo’s anguished last cry. The stage brightens gradually to reveal a ceremonial dance in progress comprising six couples. The women twirl round the men in long gowns, each in a single pastel colour. The dance lasts for a minute before the Macbeths enter and continues all the way till Lady Macbeth reminds Macbeth, ‘dian xia, nin hai mei you quan guo ke’ (My royal Lord, you do not give the cheer; line 33), creating an array of formalized movement and colour as a backdrop juxtaposed against his interview with the Murderer. This dance presentation seems to translate western grandeur into the ensemble dance conventions of Chinese opera, which also emphasize beauty and grace. Macbeth’s expansive manner and gestural elaboration of Shakespeare’s verbal welcome again carry a double reference, both to familiar customs of hospitality towards guests in Chinese cultural practice and to the imagining of a western aristocratic class. The opening of this scene reflects the entire production style of enacting aristocratic class and rank in earnest and detail, through marked costume distinctions and punctuating courtly gestures that are no longer common (at least un-ironically) in western Shakespeare performances. The nobles almost always moved across the stage in couples and accompanied their speech with formal flourishes. This display of class difference was very similar to the conventions governing fixed role-types in Chinese opera, where the prescribed make-up, costume and behaviour that distinguish and characterize each role-type immediately signal a character’s role in the drama upon his or her entrance. When adopted in the realist mode for social ranks in Macbeth, these visual and physical distinctions had the effect of stressing the privilege and power of the ruling class. They gave a presentational quality to the realist representation, which is best described as a kind of pageantry. Xu’s choice of Macbeth would have had a special resonance for Chinese audiences who had experienced a crisis in political leadership. At the same time, his staging of the

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production as a western performance would have provided them (and himself) some distance for reflection. The acting moved from one unit of dramatic action to the next in very clear, precise transitions that are conventional to Chinese opera, and most often conducted through crisp switches in the characters’ movements and expressions. This style produced a rather formalized moment-by-moment naturalism. A particularly theatrical example was when Macbeth led Lady Macbeth downstage to dance, and the First Murderer followed them. His conversation with Macbeth was conducted in ‘aside’ at the edge of the stage. When the Murderer revealed that Fleance had escaped, the video-recording closed in on Macbeth’s face as he said, ‘xian zai wo que bei nao ren de yi huo he kong ju suo bao wei’ (but now I am bound in to saucy doubts and fear), while the rest of the company froze in the middle of their dance. While the close-up is a cinematic effect of the video-recording, the acting style was itself ‘framed’ for film. The heavy use of spotlighting on Macbeth, a theatrical equivalent of the close-up, invited the camera to close in at this point. Another noticeable cinematic influence was the non-diegetic music in the style of a film soundtrack. An ominous chord was heard when Macbeth saw Banquo’s Ghost, who did not physically appear, but whom the video-recording’s close-up indicated to be sitting invisibly in Macbeth’s gilt and red velvet-cushioned chair. The symbolic function of props that Xu brings from Chinese opera was powerfully deployed for character action in this scene. Macbeth dragged the red tablecloth off the dining table and leapt onto the table for his final confrontation with the Ghost, shouting ‘Qu!’ (Avaunt!) while he threw out the large red fabric like a swirling wave of blood around him. After Shakespeare’s scene ended, Lady Macbeth turned back as she was about to exit, and another close-up showed her hand seizing the tablecloth. She pulled and twisted it tightly between her hands in silent anguish; as she was led off by Macbeth, she dragged it in a slow spot-lit swathe behind them. These two moments were respectively climacteric for the characters, and transformed what we understood of their mental-emotional state through a vivid, wordless, and thus ambiguous, action. These moments demonstrated at once the presence and the resources of aesthetic principles from Chinese opera that can surface within an exercise in realism and reformulate its affect. This identification of diverse sources in the acting of Xu’s Macbeth indicates their selection, integration and shaping by an imagined – and

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desired – notion of western realist acting, rather than a close copy of any one source. The careful detail with which precise acting transitions, cinematic treatment and symbolic staging were combined suggest that the project of replicating western realism, as it is routed through Shakespeare, gave students the training in studying and adapting realism. The production reminds us that one would need to go back 250 years to ﬁnd western models of artistic training by replicating, when imitation had not yet become a diminished and discredited practice.

Reclaiming the ‘lost years’ Xu’s use of the Stanislavski system in his Macbeth looks back over what is often referred to as the ‘twenty lost years’ during which artistic growth, people’s lives and faith in political leadership were lost. His return to China from Moscow coincided with the souring of China– Soviet relations and a series of political campaigns within China that culminated in the Cultural Revolution. Mao launched the Great Leap Forward (which lasted from 1958 to 1960) shortly after the AntiRightist campaign.4 The impetus for the Great Leap Forward came from the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) realization that economic growth in China since the Party came to power had been extremely slow. Mao approached the problem with what he was best at: mass mobilization. Millions of small backyard iron smelters, all without special guidance or equipment, sprang up across China as the masses engaged in a round-the-clock ‘battle for steel’. The whole nation was rallied to the belief that in ﬁfteen years China could surpass or at least catch up with Britain, and even approach the USA.

From May 1956, intellectuals were urged to voice criticisms of the party cadres who had been lording it over them. Labelling it the Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom campaign, Mao estimated that criticism would be constructive, representing a ‘non-antagonistic contradiction’ among the people, arguably within a context of complete loyalty to the communist system. For a year China’s intellectuals said little. But then in May 1957, they began to criticize the CCP regime in rapidly escalating terms. Within ﬁve weeks the campaign was closed down. Mao and his colleagues were appalled and disillusioned by the outburst of criticism that showed the considerable disenchantment of the intellectuals with the CCP regime. In 1957, they retaliated by making intellectuals, as well as some CCP members, the targets of the Anti-Rightist Campaign. Somewhere between 300,000 and 700,000 skilled people were removed from their jobs and given the devastating title of ‘rightist’, an enemy of the people.

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Relations between China and Russia began to disintegrate when the then Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev openly criticized the Great Leap Forward. This falling-out worsened until in the mid-1960s Khrushchev suddenly withdrew all Soviet technicians from China, along with their blueprints. The CCP was soon issuing ideological blasts against Soviet revisionism to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and being repaid in kind. In December 1963, Mao commented on a report submitted by a member of the Literature and Arts Section of the Central Committee’s Department of Propaganda: Problems abound in all forms of art such as the opera, ballads, music and ﬁne arts, the dance, the cinema, poetry and literature, and the people involved are numerous; in many departments very little has been achieved so far in socialist transformation. The ‘dead’ still dominate in many departments. What has been achieved in the cinema, new poetry, folk songs, the ﬁne arts, and the novel should not be underestimated, but there, too, quite a few problems exist. As for such departments as the opera, the problems are even more serious. The social and economic base has changed, but the arts as part of the superstructure, which serves this base, still remains a serious problem. Hence we should proceed with investigation and study and attend to this matter in earnest. Isn’t it absurd that many communists are enthusiastic about promoting feudal and capitalist art, but not socialist art?5

Mao’s instructions were immediately transmitted to literature and arts circles all over the country, provoking more public denunciations of writers and practitioners as well as public criticism of certain works, concepts and ideas. Shakespeare belonged to Mao’s categories of ‘dead’ and capitalist arts that his political agenda opposed. The wind had once again changed direction. Productions of Shakespeare were suspended, including the many performances planned across China to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth in 1964. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that ofﬁcially began in 1966 subjected theatre to stringent political control. In the subsequent decade, only the so-called revolutionary model operas were given the seal of approval by Jiang Qing (Mao’s wife) and her faction, known as

www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-9/mswv9_08. htm.

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the Gang of Four.6 Other forms of theatre were denounced as decadent and banned, and theatre artists were sent to work in the countryside and in factories. Performances of western or classical Chinese drama ceased. Although Shakespeare was never publicly denounced, since he had been complimented by Marx and Engels, teaching or performing Shakespeare was often listed among other ‘crimes’ that individual artists and scholars were alleged to have committed. By the time the Cultural Revolution ended in 1976, many young people had never heard of any artistic work except the revolutionary operas and a few revolutionary films or paintings. By June 1966, classes had been suspended nationwide from primary schools upwards. In Beijing, throngs of young demonstrators lined the major streets holding giant portraits of Mao, beating drums and shouting slogans against his perceived enemies. The movement quickly escalated to the level of a nationwide mass campaign, calling on everyone to carry out the task of transforming the superstructure by writing big-character posters and holding great debates. In the first two or three years, student activists such as the Red Guards expanded their areas of authority and accelerated their efforts at socialist reconstruction. They began by distributing leaflets explaining their actions to develop and strengthen socialism, and posting the names of suspected ‘counterrevolutionaries’ on bulletin boards. Then they assembled in large groups, and held ‘great debates’: public meetings to criticize, and solicit self-criticisms from, suspected counter-revolutionaries. Partly to contain this social disruption, in December 1968 Mao began the Down to the Countryside Movement. During this movement, which lasted for the next decade, young intellectuals – a term used in the broadest sense to refer to recently graduated middle-school students – living in cities were ordered to go to the countryside. In the late 1970s, these young intellectuals were finally allowed to return to their home cities. This trajectory is encapsulated in another student Shakespeare production, Much Ado About Nothing, directed by one of the Soviet 6

The Gang of Four came to prominence during the Cultural Revolution and were subsequently charged with a series of treasonous crimes. The members consisted of Mao Zedong’s last wife Jiang Qing, the leading ﬁgure of the group, and her close associates Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan and Wang Hongwen. They effectively controlled the power organs of the Communist Party of China during the latter stages of the Cultural Revolution, although it remains unclear which major decisions were made through Mao Zedong and carried out by the Gang of Four, and which were the result of the Gang of Four’s own planning.

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experts, Yevgeniya Konstantinovna Lipkovskaya in 1957 at the Shanghai Theatre Academy. This production was revived in 1961 and 1979 by Hu Dao, who had served as one of her assistants. The 1961 revival took place amidst the hopeful but brief moment encouraging ‘a hundred flowers to bloom’, and was produced by the Shanghai Theatre Academy’s Experimental Company (shang hai xi ju xue yuan shi yan ju tuan), whose members were all graduates of the Shanghai Theatre Academy. Soon after the Cultural Revolution ended, the production was revived a second time in April 1979, with the same director and cast as in 1961; only the theatre company’s name had been changed to the Shanghai Youth Spoken Drama Company (shang hai qing nian hua ju tuan). After eighteen years, the actors had aged and did not look appropriate to their roles. But it was a manifestation that in theatre, as in everything else in China, there was an overwhelming desire to make up for the incalculable losses from the political movements. The year 1957 was the first of China’s ‘twenty lost years’; ‘lost’ in the sense that patriotic talent had been stultified and prevented from supporting the nation’s development. The ‘ten lost years’, a phrase later used to characterize Mao’s Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976, was only a continuation of what had begun in 1957. People whose careers had been interrupted for ten years or more expected, and were expected, to pick up where they had been forced to leave off. After the Cultural Revolution, everyone attempted to put the clock back ten years, and a rehabilitation of the work done before the Cultural Revolution took priority. In this context, Xu’s Macbeth may be praised for its originality in many respects, but was not without faults that reflected the entanglements of hua ju in the post-Mao era. In particular, the acting tended to suffer from the exaggeration and non-naturalistic manner of traditional opera, features that Xu had not intentionally adopted. Another problem was that the characters in Macbeth seemed oversimplified into ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’, the colours of their wigs often suggesting to which category the characters belonged. The point here is that even so profoundly nuanced a vision of the play as Xu’s could not escape the ideological stereotyping of themes and characters prevalent in propagandist theatre. The performance also failed to escape the ‘principle of the three standouts’ (san tu chu yuan ze), which was a legacy of the Cultural Revolution. This is highly ironic and illuminates the situation of theatre in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The ‘three standouts’ principle,

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imposed on theatre, literature and the arts by Jiang Qing, required artistic works to contain ‘positive characters’ (zheng mian ren wu) who would stand out from the masses; then ‘heroic characters’ (ying xiong ren wu) who would stand out among the positive character group; and finally a ‘central heroic character’ (zhu yao ying xiong ren wu) who would stand out from the ‘heroic’ subgroup. A work of art was obliged to use every available means to enable the central character to ‘stand out’. The entrance of Macbeth and Banquo to Duncan’s court (Act 1 scene 4) is a typical example. Their arrival was first signalled by Rosse’s exaggerated entrance cue. Immediately after Duncan’s line, ‘ta shi wo suo ceng jing jue dui xin ren de yi ge ren’ (He was a gentleman on whom I built / An absolute trust; lines 13–14), shouts of ‘bi xia’ (Your Majesty) were heard and, while running on stage, the blond-wigged Rosse cried out: ‘ma ma ke bai si jiang jun he ban ke jiang jun ta meng hui lai le’ (General Macbeth and General Banquo are back!) Rosse’s excitement was emphasized by his stammering of the transliteration of ‘Macbeth’, ‘Ma-Makebaisi’ (Rosse’s lines were added by the director). Upon reaching centre stage where Duncan was enthroned upon a tiered platform, Rosse pirouetted ninety degrees with upraised arm, and all followed his gesture, turning to where Macbeth and Banquo were to appear. As the crowd moved in that direction, Macduff stepped forward to greet Macbeth, called out his name twice and ushered him to Duncan, with Banquo following behind. Macbeth then ran up the steps to kiss Duncan’s hand. By keeping Macbeth the focus of everyone’s attention, this small episode made clear to the audience that he was the most prominent figure on stage. Even though the ‘three standouts’ would have been anathema to Xu and other artists in 1980, the principle had apparently become so deeply ingrained in hua ju practice as to be well-nigh ineradicable. Applying the ‘three standouts’ principle to highlight Macbeth’s entrance would have appeared deeply ironic to a reflective audience. Xu had, after all, envisioned in Macbeth ‘a giant who wanders, stumbles and eventually drowns in . . . whirlpools of blood’.7 Macbeth was a fallen giant who could have become a people’s hero. 7

Xu Xiaozhong, ‘Ma ke bai si chu tan: ma ke bai si de pai yan yu jiao xue’ [Preliminary reﬂections on Macbeth: teaching and rehearsing Macbeth], in Xiang ‘biao xian mei xue’ tuo kuan de dao yan yi shu [Towards an ‘expressive aesthetics’ in the art of directing] (Beijing: Zhong guo xi ju chu ban she, 1996), p. 246.

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Speaking Chinese like a foreign language Xu utilized the authoritative translation by Zhu Shenghao,8 which is widely considered a standard translation and noted for its orality intended for spoken delivery (as compared to the more literary style of the translation by Liang Shiqiu). Zhu’s translation attempts to keep Shakespeare’s poetic quality by employing metaphors and rhymes. Although the translation is written in prose, Zhu retains Shakespeare’s verse line breaks as far as possible where Shakespeare’s lines are in verse. To a theatre-going audience in Bejing, the language itself may sound heightened but not old fashioned. Distinctions in social class are not marked by shifts in register and diction. Although the linguistic style of the translation is quite contemporary and natural, the actors’ delivery of their lines sounds artificial, however. To some audiences, the exaggerated and unnatural speech may appear to be an influence of traditional theatre. On the other hand, I remember the first time I watched Xu’s Macbeth on video and felt that I was watching a western classic film dubbed in Mandarin. The delivery was deliberate and conscious. The intonation patterns and rhythms were adapted to give the listener the impression that he or she was listening to Mandarin spoken in a foreign country, or listening to a foreign language but understanding it as Mandarin. This modified intonation was most pronounced in the speaking of Shakespeare’s characters’ transliterated names. Ma-ke-bai-shi (‘Macbeth’ in Mandarin), would usually be pronounced with equal emphasis on each syllable, since each is denoted by an individual Chinese character. In this performance, ‘ma’ was pronounced normally while ‘ke-bai-shi’ was glided through. This play with variations in intonation patterns, as well as rhythm and the length of words and phrases within sentences, was sustained throughout the performance as a strategy to approximate the musicality of Shakespeare’s poetry and convey the sense of a foreign language. One could argue that the ‘foreign Chinese’ in this performance was an integral part of the strategy of presenting a western performance of Shakespeare.

A widely used version is the Complete Works of Shakespeare, translated by Zhu Shenghao and published by Shi jie shu ju in Shanghai in 1947.

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Shakespeare in the drama academy, 2011 We would like to shift ground here to a 2011 student production in Shanghai entitled Love, Desire, Power, directed by Gu Yi-An in collaboration with the Australian director Robert Drafﬁn at the Shanghai Theatre Academy. This production was not a graduating production but a presentation of scene work by second-year acting students. The script was a collage of eight scenes from six Shakespeare plays and four of his sonnets, linked together through the themes of love, desire and power. Gu compared, revised and collated several standard Chinese translations into a more colloquial and contemporary idiom. The sonnets were recited at intervals between the scenes, with a contemporary response interjected after every phrase. Such a treatment and reconstruction of any writer’s, let alone Shakespeare’s, work manifests a high degree of familiarity with and conﬁdence in treating the writer’s work as one’s own. Moreover, it predicates a high level of competence in Shakespeare’s work among audiences, who are expected to recognize and supply the resonance of each scene from its context in the respective play (see Fig. 6.2).

Figure 6.2 Love, Desire, Power by the Shanghai Theatre Academy, directed by Gu Yi-An and Robert Drafﬁn (Shanghai, 2011).

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The collation of scenes in this script is unusual in Shakespeare bricolage for retaining each scene in full. As a result, Shakespeare’s scenic structure and shape formed a series of whole units. Part 1 recited Sonnet 116, ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds’, as a preface. Part 2 was the balcony scene of Romeo and Juliet (2.2); Part 3 was the meeting of Kate and Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew (2.1); and Part 4 was the scene in Antony and Cleopatra when Cleopatra learns of Antony’s marriage to Octavia (4.2). The first three scenes resembled musical variations on a theme, each focusing on a problem in the lovers’ union that moved towards a provisional resting point, each dramatizing spontaneous emotional expression between lovers in a different tonality. After these scenes, Part 5, Sonnet 129, ‘The expense of spirit in a waste of shame’, introduced a darker side of love intertwined with political power. Part 6 was the confrontation scene of Lady Macbeth with Macbeth (1.7); and Part 7 put together the two scenes of Isabella’s meetings with Angelo in Measure for Measure (2.2 and 2.4). In Part 8, the last quatrain and couplet of Sonnet 94, ‘They that have power to hurt and will do none’, provided the transition into death. Part 9 was the scene where Caesar’s body was presented in the Forum in Julius Caesar (3.2); and Part 10 was Cleopatra’s death scene in the monument (5.2). The play closed with Sonnet 29, ‘When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes’. Although this succession of key scenes was drawn from different plays and performed by changing pairs of actors, the thematic development was surprisingly coherent and convincing in the juxtaposition and interplay of relationships between the principal characters. The style of performance likewise demonstrated a freedom from model performances of Shakespeare, and the realism in the acting had become naturalism, reflecting everyday Chinese speech, culture and modes of behaviour. Comparing the performance styles of Xu’s Macbeth in 1980 and Love, Desire, Power in 2011 shows the changes that have taken place in the span of thirty years in Chinese approaches to Shakespeare in the academy, and their surrounding social contexts. The strongest marker of a Chinese performance in Xu’s Macbeth was the Chinese language into which Shakespeare’s text was translated. In that production, the actors’ speech in the manner of ‘foreign Chinese’ defined the kind of replication at work in their visual and musical mirroring of a western performance. In contrast, the students in Love, Desire, Power spoke the translated Shakespeare lines as if the language and idiom were their

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own, and their delivery of the lines as well as their movements were much lighter. Their acting style used small movements and gestures, contained and natural, rather than broader, more ‘theatrical’ facial expressions. In fact, their overall visual presentation gave the impression of a preparation for television acting careers. The actors introduced comic inﬂection, whereas Xu’s style in Macbeth made little room for humour. The acting area consisted of a bare runway stage with white backdrop. A row of chairs at the left and right sides of the stage seated actors when they were not performing. All the actors wore black costumes, similar to what they would wear for a practical class. They sang contemporary Mandarin love ballads as an opening and closing chorus. Media projection consisted of images of western couples in romantic poses juxtaposed with macabre images (e.g. skulls, people screaming, decaying teeth). The scene from Julius Caesar where Brutus addresses the mob was live-feed. Underlying these staging strategies is a changing relationship with Shakespeare and the West, where greater ease with Shakespeare’s classic status is manifested in a growing trend towards adaptation for popularization.9

Shakespeare and Shanghai Shanghai occupies a historically significant position in the introduction of Shakespeare productions into China. The very first record of a Shakespeare production in China was The Merchant of Venice, performed by students of St John’s University in Shanghai in 1902, eleven years before the first record of a professional staging of a Shakespeare play in 1913, again a production of The Merchant of Venice in Shanghai.10 It was also in Shanghai that the first Shakespeare performance using a complete translation was staged. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, Shanghai, with its large European, American and other foreign communities, and prosperous industrial and financial development, has been considered the most

A very popular adaptation was Romeo and Zhu Ying Tai by the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre in 2008–9. 10 Meng Xianqiang. Zhong Guo Sha Xue Jian Shi [A brief history of Shakespeare Study in China] (Jilin: Dong bei shi fan da xue chu ban she, 1994), pp. 138–9.

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modern place in China. It was the cradle of the wen ming xi (civilized drama) movement, the precursor to hua ju, and many literary people came to live in Shanghai because the foreign concessions in the city offered some freedom for publications and stage productions. For centuries, Shanghai has been a major administrative, shipping and trading town. It became one of several Chinese cities opened to foreign trade following the British victory over China in the First Opium War (1839–42); the 1842 Treaty of Nanking allowed the establishment of the Shanghai International Settlement. The city then flourished as a centre of commerce between East and West and became the undisputed financial hub of the Asia Pacific in the 1930s. When the Communist Party came into power in 1949, trade was reoriented to focus on socialist countries, and the city’s global influence declined. However, economic reforms introduced by Deng Xiaoping in the 1990s resulted in an intense redevelopment of Shanghai, aiding the return of finance and foreign investment to the city. This historical backdrop enables one to appreciate the performance of Gu Yi’an’s Love, Desire, Power as well as its comparison to Xu’s Macbeth. One could argue that given Shanghai’s openness as a trading city and later an international settlement, Shakespeare as an icon of western culture has been more readily assimilated into its own culture than in Beijing. The confidence and comfort level displayed by the production attest to this openness. While Xu’s Macbeth can be seen as an attempt to restart the development of modern theatre from the time of the Soviet experts, Gu’s Love, Desire, Power can be seen as a return to the Shanghai culture that was already modern and international before the People’s Republic.

Conclusion The discourse of Shakespeare production in China is dominated by ideological rhetoric. This rhetoric is couched in terms of value judgements that deﬁne critical interpretation, regulated by censorship and ofﬁcial artistic, educational and funding policies, and mobilized in artistic strategies adopted by productions. All the production choices we have discussed position Shakespeare in an ideological frame that comes into view precisely through the changing of the frame. Each artistic strategy of the three productions stages the national agendas for the future, mirrored by the past: re-imagining realist western

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Shakespeare performance, as in Xu’s Macbeth at the start of the xin shi qi (new era) in 1980; reviving an older production to reset the clock, as in the 1961 Much Ado; or resisting the reverence for Shakespeare in a popular collage of bite-sized key scenes in Love, Desire, Power. The ideological frame that has been placed on theatre in the course of twentieth-century history at the same time gives student Shakespeare production in China an unusual prominence. Owing to the co-option of hua ju by the Communist government, theatre performances may carry the enlarged political signiﬁcance of a national event. In China, a student Shakespeare production – if it is mounted by one of three premier academies – is regularly attended by the head of state, who goes on to the stage to be photographed with the company. Shakespeare production in China is moving away from statesanctioned ideological imperatives – but at the same time, the overtly non-ideological framing is itself a reaction to politically driven approaches/aesthetics and their grand narratives. Gu’s Love, Desire, Power is one example of more personal and individual approaches to the symbolic value of Shakespeare’s work, as it represents western and universal high culture. Or, as the Chinese expression puts it, how the Shakespeare ﬂag should be carried by Chinese theatre.

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