Worlds Elsewhere (73 page)

When it first went on stage in autumn 1957, Lipkovskaya's version of Shakespeare's summery comedy was acclaimed as a ‘magnificent' demonstration of what Chinese
huaju
could learn from the west. Designed to look as if the actors had stepped out of a
quattrocento
fresco, it presented an enticingly distant world, one safely removed from the uneasy realities of the Hundred Flowers campaign. As the curtain rose on the shimmering Sicilian city of Messina, recreated in painstaking detail down to the roast goose on a silver salver, even the title – translated as
Wushi shengfei
(‘Looking for Trouble in Trivial Matters') – seemed to illustrate the point. This was Shakespeare as sunny, escapist fantasy.

But
Much Ado About Nothing,
like everything else, found itself sucked into China's tumultuous cultural politics. Originally intended to be revived in 1958, the production had to be halted in the chaos of the Great Leap Forward, and it wasn't until 1961 – Lipkovskaya long gone
and the USSR and China no longer on speaking terms – that it made its way back on stage. Hu Dao, Lipkovskaya's assistant, directed. Again it was a hit. Alongside the production photos I found a shot of a long line of people queuing outside the theatre, clutching parasols against the fierce Shanghai sun.

No one knew it, but when the curtain came down on
Much Ado About Nothing
two months later it would be one of the last times that Shakespeare would be seen on the professional Chinese stage in nearly twenty years. The following year there was a production at the Shanghai Film School of
Twelfth Night
– another comedy, again a revival – but that same summer, 1962, there was a scandal around a satirical play referencing Mao, and Madame Mao had her excuse. Its author was arrested. Four years later the Cultural Revolution would be in full, murderous sway and Shakespeare forbidden entirely.

So what of the 1979
Much Ado About Nothing,
apparently identical in every respect to its 1961 incarnation? Incredible as it seemed, as well as being nearly the last professional production of Shakespeare to be seen before the Cultural Revolution, it was the very first to go on stage afterwards. Three years after Mao's death – the same strange, suspenseful year that the Chinese premier Deng Xioaping met US president Jimmy Carter to negotiate a policy of detente – as many of the original performers as could be found assembled in a rehearsal room and prepared to do
Much Ado About Nothing
one final time. The scripts were retrieved from the archive, along with the director's notes. The set was carefully reconstructed. Zhu Xijuan and Jiao Huang and other members of the 1961 cast relearned their lines. Costumes, design, choreography: everything the same. It would be as if nothing had happened.

Li Ruru, sent to work in the fields as a teenager, had seen the production as part of the first cohort of students to study at the Shanghai Drama Academy after the Cultural Revolution. I found her account of it almost unbearably poignant. ‘“Much ado about nothing” in Chinese seemed such a beautiful expression,' she wrote. ‘We hoped it could excise our bitter experience with the easy and confident wisdom that the title implies.'

I found Benedick. Now seventy-nine, Jiao Huang had become one of China's biggest theatre stars and was a reliable presence in television
historical dramas. He agreed to an interview. Shakespeare was one of his favourite writers; he would be overjoyed to discuss the great English poet.

When I arrived at his apartment, Jiao was in expansive mood: resplendent in American jeans and snakeskin cowboy boots, with wide, pronounced features and hair slicked back in a flamboyant quiff. On the way up the stairs, he thumped a metal breastplate attached to the wall – his costume in a recent production of
Antony and Cleopatra.
Above it was a terracotta plate, a gift from the Shakespeare Society of China.

Yes, he chuckled through a nimbus of cigarette smoke, he had indeed been in that
Much Ado About Nothing.
Not twice, though: all three times. In 1957 he had been too young to take a main role; he and his student colleagues had been cast in bit parts – knights, servants, guards, spear-carriers, all adding to the grand Italianate effect.

In 1961 it had finally been his turn; in Hu Dao's revival, he was chosen to play Benedick. From the shelf next to him, crammed with gold statuettes, he prised an album and found the relevant page – Jiao stripped to his doublet in the duel scene; looking rogueish in his officer's uniform. It was definitely the same production. In the background was the splendid stained glass of a church, meticulously imitated by Lipkovskaya's technicians. It made a tiny stage in Shanghai look like the cathedral of Notre Dame.

‘It all wove together seamlessly,' he said. ‘The music and dance was beautiful; the dances were choreographed by another Soviet expert, I think. At the academy, we had dance classes for two years – two classes on western dancing, two on Chinese dancing. Eight classes in total including review sessions, every week.'

He looked rapturous at the memory. ‘The body movements, the pace and the speed – Shakespeare's plays in particular, you cannot do them without this knowledge.'

How had audiences reacted?

‘Every show was a full house, every night for two months. It was so lively, no one had ever seen anything like it. Everyone walked out of the theatre with a big smile on their faces.' He turned to me with a wink. ‘A few years ago, I saw a British film version of
Much Ado About Nothing.
I think our performance was just as good as theirs.'

Did he ever feel uncomfortable wearing western costumes – the hairpieces, false noses and the rest?

He emitted an explosive bark of laughter, and fired up another
cigarette. ‘To perform a foreign play, you cannot be Chinese. Lin Zhaohua in Beijing, he transforms Shakespeare's plays into something completely Chinese. Myself, I don't like this. What is the point of creating something if there is no difficulty at all? For each play I perform, I must change completely, from inside out, like a rebirth.'

Beneath the swaggering bravado I detected something else. As we talked more, its source became clear. Once the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, Jiao and his fellow actors were given a stark choice: appear in revolutionary operas, or abandon any hope of performing at all. Jiao chose the latter, and was dispatched to do farm work in the countryside outside Shanghai.

‘I didn't perform for nine years. Foreign plays were all criticised. If you were passionate about western plays, you would be so severely criticised that you couldn't lift your head …'

He stopped. The translator, embarrassed, was staring at her feet. Jiao had begun to cry.

When he restarted, his voice was hoarse. ‘I lived in a cowshed. I experienced everything. My house was destroyed.'

Many people in the west would find it bizarre, I said, staging exactly the same production in exactly the same way after the Cultural Revolution, as if those ten terrible years had never happened.

His gaze was level. ‘I was even more passionate about performing Shakespeare's play. I poured all my energies into it. It is part of civilisation, is it not? How can anyone abandon it?'

Had it been hard, revisiting something from much happier times?

‘Every single performance was different from before. The way we looked was not different, but the feelings and emotions were never the same.'

In 2012 he'd directed
Antony and Cleopatra,
a lifetime's ambition. It was an unashamedly old-fashioned production, he said, showing me photos that proved the point. He read out a passage from the essay he'd written for the programme. It was hardly poetry, particularly in translation, but I was caught by his suggestion that ‘history is like a mirror of the sky, reflecting the changes of society and human beings'. Perhaps Shakespeare's plays could provide a kind of consolation for the bitter sorrows and humiliations of human experience. Mirroring history, they also helped make sense of it.

At the back of my mind was a book by the American critic C. L. Barber called
Shakespeare's Festive Comedy.
Published in the late 1950s, when Jiao
and his colleagues had been preparing the first version of their escapist
Much Ado About Nothing,
it argued that the concept of festive renewal lay at the heart of the comedies, connecting them with ancient folk rites and myths, medieval mumming plays and May games – images of good conquering evil at the most basic, primal level. Barber's insistence on the healing power of happy endings had been dismissed as sentimental hogwash by younger critics, brought up in a more cynical era, but I thought the idea had real resonance here. Comedy equals tragedy plus time; by acting happily-ever-after, perhaps you could make it real.

Jiao lit yet another cigarette, his tenth in forty-five minutes. Through the smoke he looked impregnable, mysterious.

‘Life has a lot of hardships, difficulties, but this is actually very important for an actor. These experiences should accumulate in your heart. Intellectuals in Britain are more innocent. They may not have accumulated such suffering and hardship as their Chinese counterparts have.'

It was hard to disagree, I said.

TWO DAYS AND A SHORT PLANE TRIP LATER,
I was sneaking into the back of a room at National Taiwan Normal University. All I could see was a scrum of photographers and hands with cameraphones attached to them waving high in the air. The room was hot and bright. In the background was pre-recorded Elizabethan lute music, though it was hard to tell over the yelling and the clattering of camera shutters.

On a dais at the front, a group of dignitaries was blinking in the TV lights. Behind them was a poster depicting a cartoonish skyline – a child's compendium of global cities, the Eiffel Tower next to Tower Bridge next to a chunk of the Forbidden City. Romping across this interconnected global megalopolis, like a balding Godzilla, was a figure just about identifiable as William Shakespeare. The ruff was there, as was the goatee, but he looked distinctly Asian. Also, there were three of him. One was doing the V-for-victory sign like a Chinese teenager posing for a snapshot. Various people had told me during my odyssey that Shakespeare was taking over the world, but I had never yet seen the image rendered literally.

As the Q&A session got going, I crammed myself next to the
Taipei Times
and pulled out my notebook, wondering vaguely if an academic Shakespeare conference had ever before attracted a roomful of hacks. Almost certainly not. But it appeared the Asian Shakespeare Association had realised it was a story.

I'd first heard of the ASA in Delhi the previous year. Fed up with attending international conferences in Europe or America, a group of academics had banded together and decided to set up a pan-Asian society of their own. The ASA would be run by Asians, for Asians. Among the membership were scholars from India, Japan, the Philippines, Korea, Malaysia and Singapore, not to mention a sizeable team from Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau and the mainland. This was the ASA's debut gathering.

While the Chinese journalists shouted questions, I scanned the programme – three full days of plenary papers, seminars, round tables, acting and events, featuring many big names from the global academic scene. There were sessions on Shakespearian acting and contemporary Asian politics, cross-cultural performativity, translation and adaptation, early-modern travel.

Arguably, though, the ASA mattered less for what it included than what it signified. Global Shakespeare was becoming a hot academic field, but – like most of academia – its power bases were overwhelmingly in the west. The best jobs, the resources, the funding, the journals: all were still in Europe and North America. Even within Asia, 30 per cent of the world's land mass, scholars didn't engage with each other. Locked in their specialist geographical areas, the Indians didn't talk to the Japanese, or the Filipinos to the Koreans. The ASA would change all that, was the idea. The conference theme, somewhat pointedly, was ‘Shakespearian journeys'. In Shakespeare, as in global politics and economics, Asia was in the ascendant.

The microphone was handed to the flustered-looking Australian chair of the International Shakespeare Association, who promptly claimed that Shakespeare was born in London and worked in Stratford, which caused a minor diplomatic incident when it was relayed in Chinese.

He tried again, sweat visibly beading on his forehead. ‘The founding of the Asian Shakespeare Association proves enormous interest in and engagement of the people of Asia with Shakespeare.' This time there was enthusiastic nodding.

I listened hard as the chair of the ASA, Bi-qi Lei, stepped forward to give her closing remarks in Mandarin. The only word I recognised was the name
‘Shashibiya'.
Slim, with a cascade of black hair, she had
the look of a petite praying mantis dressed by Armani. Unlike the Europeans, she looked in full control of the situation.