Worlds Elsewhere (66 page)

Chinese scholars obediently analysed the plays in dialectical terms, ransacking them for examples of class conflict. One critic described
King Lear
as ‘the portrayal of the shaken economic foundations of the feudal society'.
Hamlet
became not a study in savage introspection, but a ‘social tragedy' whose hero's solemn duty is to free the
Lumpenproletariat.
The description of the Renaissance offered in
Dialectics of Nature
by Marx's co-author Friedrich Engels (yet another passionate Shakespearian) as ‘the greatest progressive revolution that mankind has so far experienced, a time which called for giants and produced giants', was often quoted. That Shakespeare had been a shareholder in a profitable entertainment business was conveniently glossed over.

So it went on, Shen nexplained: China became one of the only countries in the world where
Timon of Athens
– neglected academically, barely staged – was not only read but keenly debated. Even Shakespeare's star-crossed lovers became subject to remorseless dialectical-materialist forces: I had heard
Romeo and Juliet
described in many ways, but never before as a reflection of ‘the desire of the bourgeois class to shake off the yoke of the feudal ethical code'.

I sensed I was being a dull student. Shen briskly shook his head. ‘Yes, this Marxist interpretation of Shakespeare is not very original, much of it is just imported from Russia. But Marxist analysis did make a dramatic impact on Chinese interpretation of art and history.'

Did he have a favourite play?

He barely paused.
‘Coriolanus. Coriolanus
is my favourite play.'

Could he give me a Marxist reading?

He grinned narrowly. ‘Class war. Nothing new to China. Shakespeare is a very keen observer of this class war.'

Where did he place himself, politically?

‘I would be put on the left side. But it depends.' He grinned again. ‘Another truth about China: change is all!'

Outside on the street, the atmosphere was of a sedate, slightly beery carnival. I had forgotten: it was May Day, the socialist holiday and in China the start of a three-day public festival. As I walked down Wangfujing towards the central shopping district, the crowds were out in force, enjoying as much of the spring sunshine as could be detected through a bilious filter of smog. Young fathers with chubby toddlers on their shoulders, wives in hot pants sporting serious-looking handbags, sharply dressed teenagers by the score: I threaded my way through them all as they mounted a combined offensive on the citadels of Starbucks and Zara and Gap.

On a corner I saw a camera store. One window proudly displayed portraits of Mao and Deng Xiaoping; the other glittered with hundreds of imported Canons and Nikons. It seemed as clear a metaphor as one could want for the present state of China.

Strange Tales from Overseas …
When Shakespeare had first been translated into Chinese, via the Lambs, it had been as stories from the remote and exotic Occident. It took significantly longer for the plays to appear as they'd originally been written: dramas to be performed on stage.

Partly this was because – not dissimilar from India – China had its own vigorous and highly characteristic theatrical traditions. By western standards, the drama of the Middle Kingdom is almost unimaginably ancient. Its deepest origins, possibly religious or shamanic, are obscure, but by the Shang dynasty (which began around 1600
BCE,
a millennium before Thespis, the first recorded Greek actor, stepped on stage) hunting rituals had become codified into dances and performances. By the time of the Zhou dynasty (
c
.1046–256
BCE),
these had become chorus dances. Grand spectacles known as
baixi
(‘hundred entertainments') became popular at the imperial court, a smorgasbord of music, miming, magic, martial arts and dancing.

Back in my apartment, I studied photographs online: Tang-dynasty tomb figurines from
c
.700
CE
were especially vivid; graceful renderings of dancers with sexily sashaying hips and long, flowing sleeves. Had it not been for their chipped paint, they could have been sculpted yesterday.

The Tang emperors were especially passionate about drama, staging lavish spectacles – the most remarkable of which, laid on for a Turkish embassy during the seventh century, required a kilometre-square stage and several thousand acrobats, dancers and magicians. Many early playtexts date from this period. Surviving scripts include one entitled
Tayao niang
(‘The Dancing, Singing Wife'), in which a husband who beats his partner receives his just deserts (a nice riposte to
Shrew
the other evening, I thought), and a vaguely
Hamlet-
ish story called
Buotou buotou
(‘Head for Head') telling of a youth whose father has been killed by a tiger and is bent upon revenge.

Many of these forms are preserved in Chinese opera–which, though codified much later, is a pottage of ancient ingredients. Beijing opera, the form best known in the west, is just one branch of traditional opera (known overall as
jingju, jing
meaning ‘capital city'). There are local variants throughout China, encompassing a dazzling variety of techniques – martial arts, mime, dance and acrobatics alongside singing, acting and costume/make-up.

In Britain a few years before, I'd watched a company from Shanghai perform a version of
Hamlet
called
The Revenge of Prince Zi Dan.
It was my first exposure to live
jingju,
an art form as remote from my previous experience as Aboriginal Dreamtime dance or Tanzanian hip-hop. Visually, the piece was spectacular, the stage crammed with actors in flowing robes and elaborate headdresses, with Hamlet as an athletic and dauntingly active warrior prince balancing on platform heels five inches high. The music was even more memorable: to an artillery of clanging percussion and squealing fiddles, the performers affected a nasal, fearsomely virtuosic singing style that sounded as though it could penetrate a brick wall at a thousand paces. I left the performance both deafened and impressed.

A morning's research and a visit to the Zhengyici theatre, one of the very few traditional ‘tea-house' opera houses left in Beijing – built in 1688 and beautifully restored, a lustrous jewel box in crimson, emerald and gold – helped me understand a little more. That the acting is heavily stylised was already obvious, but what I hadn't appreciated is that similar imperatives govern plot and character.

Jingju
is an actors' art. Just four basic roles exist –
sheng
(male),
dan
(female),
jing
(painted-face male) and
chou
(male clown). These divide into subtypes of age or disposition (
laodan,
old woman;
daomadan,
young female warrior;
huadan,
‘flower girl', a coquette). Traditionally
performers are taught in specialised schools from a young age, and spend many years in gruelling physical training, acquiring the strict requirements of their character type – the trembling falsetto of an adolescent boy, or the flashing sword skills of a virile young warrior (this must have been Hamlet, I realised). They might sometimes graduate within that type – ageing gracefully from
xiaosheng
(young scholar) to
laosheng
(elderly scholar) – but they would almost never leave it. Of the thousand-plus operas considered part of the repertoire, nearly all are centred on these types. Players spend entire careers performing just one character, honing it to flawless perfection.

Shakespeare would have recognised one aspect of
jingju
at least: female performers were initially banned from participating and only began to do so in the late nineteenth century. A few companies keep the old ways alive. At the Zhengyici I watched a male actor who specialised in the
qingyi
(‘green robes') role of a mature or married woman wafting dolefully across the stage, resplendent in robes rippling with chrysanthemums and plum blossoms. Beneath a teetering headdress encrusted with pearls and flowers, his face was painted chalk-white. His voice was high and thin, but affecting in its fragility. For the first time, I understood why the sound was so piercing–it needed to project unamplified above the crashing and caterwauling of the orchestra. Sad and sweetly funny, he would have made a splendid Nurse in
Romeo and Juliet.

But the rigorous refinements of
jingju
made it a prison. Inspired by the scholars calling for Chinese literature to open itself to outside influences, reformers argued that traditional opera was incapable of communicating genuine dramatic truth. They began to agitate for different kinds of theatre on Chinese stages. Following the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1912 and the founding of the Republic, interest grew in
wenming xi,
‘civilised drama', based on western models.

One model was provided by the schools and universities founded by missionaries in treaty ports such as Nanjing and Shanghai, which had exposed Chinese students to western-style education – including Shakespeare – and the rudiments of translation. Students had been taking part in English-language performances of the plays since at least the 1890s, including stagings of the trial scene from
The Merchant of Venice.

Enter
Shashibiya
and, again, Lin Shu. In July 1913, an adaptation called
Rou quan
(‘Bond of Flesh'), based on Lin's version of the
Lambs' retelling of
The Merchant of Venice,
was acted by the National Renewal Society of Shanghai. A box-office hit, it sparked a fashion for Shakespearian dramas, both comedies and tragedies – notably
Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing
and
The Taming of the Shrew.

Whether these count as ‘Shakespeare' is moot, because, even more so than equivalent versions in India, these were adaptations of adaptations of adaptations, and furthermore not conventionally scripted but given to the actors as set scenarios (
mubiao
) to be improvised around.

A 1916 advert in the
Republican Daily
for yet another version of
The Merchant of Venice
entitled
Nu lushi
(‘The Female Lawyer') is a case in point. The synopsis sounds enticing, though perhaps implies that something has been lost in translation: ‘It involves cutting off a piece of one's own flesh to borrow money, while the heroine, though a woman, nevertheless becomes a lawyer.'

The publicity materials for a 1914 version of
Much Ado About Nothing
called
Yuan hu
(‘Bitterness') boast an even bigger sell, Shakespeare's global celebrity, rendered in the tremulous language of Hollywood copywriters:

Although to modern eyes
wenming xi
would look impossibly stiff, it helped shape a fledgling form known as
huaju
(‘word drama'). This flourished not in the imperial city of Beijing, where
jingju
reigned supreme, but in cosmopolitan Shanghai, more exposed to imported cinema and drama.

Early
huaju
scripts were adapted from nineteenth- and twentieth-century classics, notably those of the Norwegian pioneer of naturalistic theatre Henrik Ibsen and the crusading social realist George Bernard Shaw, both seen as more in touch with the modernising spirit of the times. Then, in the early 1920s, the dramatist Tian Han tried
something simultaneously new and old: translating into Mandarin one of Shakespeare's plays from the original. Deeply affected by the assassination of his uncle, who worked for Sun Yat-sen, founder of the Republic of China, Tian decided to adapt the most grief-stricken play in the canon,
Hamlet.
Published in book form in 1922 as
Hamengleite,
it was followed three years later by a version of
Romeo and Juliet.
These were new kinds of translations for China, drawn line by line from a reliable text, cross-checked with a Japanese translation.

But it was nearly another decade before a professional staging of a full Shakespeare play was first mounted in China, wildly late by global standards. In spring 1930, the Shanghai Drama Assembly staged – yet again –
The Merchant of Venice.
Performed in the Central Assembly Hall, the show ran for two seasons and was acclaimed for the lavish ‘accuracy' of its staging, featuring a fountain, a Venetian garden and Italian-style costumes. It set a lasting trend in China – for Shakespeare in what the theatre historian Li Ruru wittily calls the ‘original sauce': as a foreign writer who shows tantalising glimpses of exotic distant lands.

This necessitated some invasive cosmetic adjustments. Chinese actors were routinely equipped with false noses, wigs and blue eye make-up (later, blue contact lenses) to match their European costumes. When the
New York Times
drama critic Brooks Atkinson was dispatched to Asia to cover the second world war, he cabled back a review of a
Hamlet
he caught in Chongqing in December 1942. He couldn't get over the noses:

Such appendages remained routine in performances of western drama until the 1980s.