Boys will be Girls: Propeller’s ‘The Winter’s Tale’

The Winter’s Tale directed by Edward Hall and performed by  Propeller at the Sheffield Lyceum, 4th February 2012. 

My blogging time these days is largely taken up with adding transcripts and rough drafts to my private PhD blog in preparation for meeting with my Thesis Advisory Panel at the end of the summer term.  Thus, current posts here are likely to be both brief and belated. However, I really would be missing a trick if I failed to mention the recent production of The Winter’s Tale by Propeller.

Propeller’s ‘The Winter’s Tale’ (c) Manuel Harlan

 Of course, it’s not intercultural, but as with Shakesqueer, I will allow myself some leeway in my blog theme by redefining the word trans-cultural to include trans-gender/cross-gender approaches.

I had heard much about this all-male company, who resist traditional travesti performance codes by neither fully inhabiting ‘femaleness’ nor by playing the (pantomime) dame. This is not to say that there is no element of drag: even (especially) without make-up or wigs, the men’s female clothing acts to re-emphasise their maleness, be it baldness or beer-gut. However,  by acting into the words, not the ‘parts’, gender – which at the outset of the performance dominates the audience’s attention in a very simplistic way – becomes increasingly problematised.  At one level, it is an irrelevance, whilst paradoxically, at another it is intensified.

Let me try to explain what I mean through example.  Hermione, played by the shorn-headed Richard Dempsey, replete with the bulging womb of a pregnant man, is both female and male.  Standing shoulder to shoulder with his wife, Leontes’ (Robert Hands’) perverse imaginings reflect back on himself, transforming the misogynistic field of his verbal abuse into one of sexual self-loathing.  Likewise, when Hermione goes on trial, in what has become the familiar performance garb of a woman who has had her child hauled from her bloody loins, the now-blunted shock of this image is sharpened through simple defamiliarisation. Dempsey, with a man’s (the guard’s?) oversized overcoat thrown over his rags, recalls an inmate of a concentration camp, stripped of all identifying features. His (her) defence is not that of a woman against a man’s tyranny, but against tyranny itself in Sicilia.

Vince Leigh’s rugby-player Paulina stands a head above all the male courtiers and speaks half an octave lower, his/her physical dominance matched by the verbal.  Ben Allen’s roles are complex: the pyjama’d man-boy Mamillius, who opens the play bewitched by a trickle of sand, becomes Time holding an hourglass, becomes Perdita, the echo of Mamillius in a dress.

Perdita and Florizel (c) Manuel Harlan

In Bohemia, nothing is as it seems, and in this production the doubleness of this apparently bucolic paradise is doubly emphasised – and quite hilariously.  The all singing, all dancing sheep are cross-dressing men in wooly wigs and miniskirts (if  my memory serves me correctly), Camillo and Polixenes infiltrate the Glastonbury Sheep-Shearing Fest as Arkela and Brown Owl, and I’m really not sure whether Autolycus is Tom Jones or Alice Cooper.  Richard Dempsey returns as Dorcas, this time in lipstick and golden tresses and festival wellies.  And this time he really is transformed into a rather attractive and convincing woman, but this in itself, in the context of this company and this production, ensures that we never forget that he really isn’t.  However, if you ask me, Perdita and Florizel really are two boys in love, adding a whole new level of transgression to their already transgressive* relationship.  Except the transgression is not on the stage but in the eyes of the spectators.

By focussing on gender representation (or non-representation), I have of course only engaged with one facet of this production.  However, it seems to me that companies like Propeller and Two Gents Productions (coming soon!) are bringing an immediacy to Shakespeare through crossing gender boundaries in the same way that transcultured productions are actually bringing Shakespeare home.

*Re-reading this in 2018 after seeing Ben Allen in Antony and Cleopatra at the Barbican has made me realise how normalised our queer lives have become in a relatively short space of time.

Sheep-sheering festival (c) Manuel Harlan

Chinese students interpret ‘The Merchant of Venice’

Saturday 17^th December 2011, Nanjing University.

The Merchant of Venice was the first recorded play by Shakespeare put on by Chinese actors, performed (in English?) by the students of St John’s College, Shanghai (?) in 18xx (Li and Dolby).  Since then, it has been one of the most popular Shakespeare plays in Mainland China.  My friend Xu Yang recalls a children’s story she read of it as a young girl, Li Ruru introduced extracts of a Beijing Opera version at the Crossing Continents conference at the University of Nottingham-Ningbo in 2008, explaining that a greedy moneylender was already a stock character in Chinese drama, and the Taiwan Bangzi troupe relocated it to China in the Ming Dynasty, with a Muslim Shylock far from home (extract presented in London, 2009).

Last Saturday, I was invited to watch and feedback on a rehearsal by a group of Nanjing University students who were preparing two extracts to be sent to the first round of the competition of Chinese Universities Shakespeare Festival in Hong Kong, which brings together students and scholars from across the Chinese speaking world. The extracts I saw were directed by a post-graduate student and performed by three undergraduates, one male and two female, and they had chosen the first encounter between Shylock, Antonio and Bassanio, and the trial scene.  They had bridged this with Antonio’s opening soliloquy.

Their intention is to present the scenes in Renaissance costume, with the first scene in the open market place and the second the court, but for now they were in their winter clothes in a chilly empty classroom, acting to three teachers and the wall.

Their word-perfectness several weeks before the recording needed to be entered was astounding, as was their pronunciation.  Bassanio/Portia (an interesting if confusing doubling) recited beautifully.  However, these were English majors and our job was to help them shift from recitation to action.

First of all, they needed to work out what themes they were trying to convey to the audience.  Traditionally in China, Shylock being a Jew is overlooked, as is Othello’s race.  These are issues that are seen as ‘not being relevant’ in Chinese society because of its supposed homogeneity. However, the students felt that Shylock’s religion was important, as was Antonio and Bassanio’s sexuality.

Shylock, played by the group’s only man, was really very good – although perhaps a bit over the top with stage villain facial expressions, he also brought out Shylock’s vulnerability.  Antonio was a matey chap, what my Nanjing colleague Zhang Ying described as xxxx.  This is a man who will do anything for his friend, but without any sense of sexual feelings.  Bassanio, however, seemed strongly moved when he shared Antonio’s ‘In sooth I know not why I am so sad’, leading to questions about who was in love with whom. The students were encouraged that, if they wanted to do a homoerotic reading, which they were adamant they did, then they needed to work on the subtleties of this relationship.

Bassanio later had to play Portia, in a double travesti role (a girl playing a boy playing a girl).  How could she make her male Bassanio different from her male impersonator Portia? How could the audience know that she was doubling as another character, her former character’s fiancée?

I noticed that the students repeated a triangular formation and apart from Shylock were extremely reserved in their acting.  At first i wondered whether this was the difference between the physicality of Western acting and the internalisation of Eastern acting that Prof He Chengzhou remarked on to his students after I gave them a lecture.  However, on reflection, I think that the latter, at least, was probably nerves!

What really impressed me, apart from the high standard, was that four students were prepared to put hours of work into this project, their eagerness to engage with non-traditional interpretations, and their attention to detail in both speech and thought.

Good luck NanDa! I hope you get through to the finals in Hong Kong in the summer.

I’m getting married in the morning…

Periperformative endings in Shakespeare’s comedies – updating soonish…

Shakesqueer

Madhavi Menon, ed (2011) Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare Durham and London: Duke University Press

See what they did with the title there? Clever, eh? I expect that they added the subtitle just in case the main title was too obscure for anyone to work out by themselves, or perhaps in anticipation of letters of complaint from Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells, mistaking it as a Typo.

You see, I’ve recently joined my first post-graduate reading group, actually set up by somebody in the Centre for Modern Studies, but focussing on how Queer theory is applied to Shakespeare, or perhaps even how Shakespeare contributed to Queer theory.  I’ve primarily joined in order to force myself to read, but also to try to re-establish some sort of link with the academic side of the university, which has slipped somewhat since the birth of our son, although funnily enough I still manage to meet up for cups of tea with my fellow PhD candidates.  However, as a part-time student, I’m only just finishing my first year, whereas the others I started out with have now all upgraded and are heading towards pre-completion madness.  As for the Early Modern reading groups, they tend to be on libraries (as opposed to in them) so this group is perhaps closest to my field. 

If I’m honest, I feel a little out of my depth.  I’ve side-stepped literary and cultural theory as much as possible and whenever we do collide it always ends in tears.  A couple of fellow Shakesqueer attenders tried to explain Lacan’s concepts of desire to me, only to have me tremble and shake and refuse to accept that a child sexually desiring a parent should ever be a valid metaphor (p 65).

The essays are often funny and clever, however, and I will add the occassional post about them here.

Today, I just want to mention a couple of points made by Menon in her introduction, ‘Queer Shakes’.

1) Her desire is to resist the urge to simply ‘apply’ Queer theory to specific texts, producing Queer readings, and instead encourages her readers to think about where Queer theory comes from. Can a pre-nineteenth century writer, and a globally canonised one at that, be considerred as queer, she asks?  Most Queer theorists, she claims, would say no, particularly as they are instititionally resistant to even looking into a writer who represents the literary establishment so completely.  She suggests, however,  that Queer theory needs to be shaken up (get the pun?) and face the fact that without Shakespeare and his ilk the ideas behind Queer theory may never have developed in the first place (she deliberately mentions the Queer canonisation of Whitman, Woolf and Jarman, Shakespeareans all). At least, I think that is what she is arguing – it gets a little opaque here.  After all, ‘to extend queerness to [Shakespeare] is to play fast and loose with academic credibility’ (p 5).

I got a bit lost in this argument as I hadn’t realised that conservative, monolithic readings of Shakespeare were still current in academic circles.  I must have had a very liberal English teacher in 1983 because I left school thinking that Shakespeare’s plays were largely anti-establishment, sexually ambiguous and ambivalent, and I couldn’t help wondering how they had managed to take centre stage in our curriculum.  Perhaps that was because, by 1983 Julius Caesar and Henry V had been replaced by The Merchant of Venice and The Tempest. 

2) Her introduction extends Queer beyond the sense of homosexual/homosocial to the question of language and metre.  In a very interesting section on the ‘trochee’ – a stressed/unstressed pairing of syllables rather than the usual English iamb – she explores how Shakespeare ‘appears to reserve his trochees for weird characters and fairies ‘ (p 14). She has earlier argued that a trochee ‘trails off’, ‘goes nowhere’, inverts the ‘teleological imperative of progress that has shaped so much heterosexuality’ (p 14)*. Certainly, Macbeth‘s Weird Sisters and Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream are deeply disruptive.

* Does this argument work for the opening of John Donne’s Holy Sonnet 14: ‘Batter my heart, three-person’d God; for you/As yet but knock; breathe, shine, and seek to mend…’?

Girl Interrupted: Asta Nielsen’s Hamlet

What an extraordinary film.  Asta Nielsen rocks…

22nd February, 2011, Berwick Saul Building: Judith Buchanan, of the University of York, gave a graduate seminar on this 1920 German silent film adaptation of Hamlet starring the Danish actress Asta Nielsen accompanied by Michael Riessler’s 2007 score.

Judith started by thinking about the ‘paradox’ of a silent Hamlet/Hamlet.  After all, the play is, fundamentally, made up of spoken language, and explores spoken language: ‘it is concerned with private thought and public utterance, with acts of listening,’ and in terms of [performance or reception?] with privileging ‘the verbal over the gestural’.

Yet the play is full of these tensions between oppositions around speaking (Buchanan)

*encripting/laying bare

*linguistic revelation/willed suppression of language

*sustained voice/delay before speaking

and this tension between ‘linguistic expression/suppression’ is summed up in the dumb-show, the ‘aperitif’ to  The Mousetrap. 

Asta Nielsen mimed Ibsen at drama school, indicating that the transition to film in the silent era found her ‘organically in her own medium’. However, in her film, this tension between linguistic expression/suppression gets extended to gender and sexuality.

There had been a long tradition of female Hamlets preceding Asta Nielsen’s, the most famous being Sarah Bernhardt’s some twenty years earlier.  These female Hamlets emphasised the ‘sensitivity’ and ‘thoughtfulness’ associated with the ‘feminine’, as opposed to masculine action (see also the Arden 3 introduction). However, as far as I understand, Sarah Bernhardt was playing the Prince of Denmark as a man.  In this film, however, Hamlet is a girl recast as a boy by her mother, who disguises her daughter from birth in order to maintain the royal line.  Thus, Hamlet is imprisoned in a false identity.  This transformation has multiple repercussions, resulting in ‘ a remarkable and beautiful film (ie absolutely not a recording of a stage performance), […] an eyebrow-raising/interestingly re-gendered interpretation of the play and a significant landmark in the history of Hamlet performances’ (Buchanan, email 19th Feb, 2011).

These re-genderings are truly mind and gender-bending.  They significantly change the dynamics between characters, of course.  Thus, Hamlet’s literal, physical ‘brush off of Ophelia’ and his/her ‘tenderness for Horatio’, I would argue, reinstate a heteronormative reading of the play at the same time that it flirts with same-sex love through Ophelia’s and Horatio’s adoration of the ‘prince’.  Judith sees this transvesti performance itself in a context of  ‘a willed suppression of androgyny’ in a world where the ‘boyish flappers’ illustrated how the ‘social construction of gender was on the move’.

Judith also indicated how the use of Expressionist film sets, alongside Nielsen’s Hamlet’s minimalist black tunic, underscored the adaptations central themes and the relationship between the central character and the mise-en-scene.  For example, windows [and shadows cast by windows] ‘demarcated spaces’ as ‘circumscribed spaces’, underscoring Hamlet’s ‘fettered life’ and his/her emotional and political separation from the court.  Again, the casting of Hamlet as a woman ‘exaggerates the Hamletian situation’ .  We focussed on the image of Hamlet and Gertrude in the closet.  Gertrude and all the other characters are stage medieval in brocade tunics or conical hats.  Hamlet in her black clothing against the ornate backdrop of arras and chair appears to be ‘rubbed out’.

Asta Nielsen as Hamlet on Youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqHtkY9jllM

Judith has spoken on silent Hamlets before (see my post for Hamlet without English from November 20, 2009), focussing on Forbes-Robertson and Ruggeri’s films.

Hamlet from China, Part 2: When Hamlet met Horatio

 

All photographs in this post (c) Saffron Walkling, 2010

Hamlet: That is the Question was put on by the Richard Schechner Center for Performance Studies at the Shanghai Theatre Academy (STA), and directed by Benjamin Mosse and Richard Schechner (the studio theatre of the Teatrul National ‘Marin Sorescu’, Craiova, Romania: 28^th April, 2010)

Continuing from my previous post, which looked at the larger re-imagining of the play by STA, this post will focus primarily on the characterisation of three protagonists, Hamlet, Horatio and Ophelia, and give a brief description of the setting for their interactions.

This was a ‘spoken drama’ production, in Mandarin, with a contemporary, urban set.  Shaven-headed Claudius (Zheng Xing) may have entered in a military uniform, speaking like an official making a political speech, but it wasn’t long before he had stripped down to his unbuttoned red silk shirt, a tattooed and red-haired Gertrude hanging on his arm: a gangster king and his moll in a gangster court. The spotless white of the set, pristine apart from a few drops of blood dripping from the ceiling that had missed the bucket placed to catch them, gradually became scuffed and scarred by the action that unfolded.  Throughout the performance, various characters mopped away, in increasingly futile attempts to remove the dirt.  Fortinbras was cut out altogether in this version, but corruption was foregrounded.

Hamlet

Hamlet (Xue Guanglei)

Hamlet (Xue Guanglei) wasn’t Zhang’s Confucian hero (Shakespeare in China, 1996).  He was neither an intellectual nor an incorruptible outsider in this court, nor did he appear to have any ‘sense of political responsibility’ (213-4).  In fact, he reminded me of the arrogant but undeniably cool young man who used to doss around at the back of my class at Shandong University. The wealthy son of a successful businessman, he would mock the majority of the class for their studious ways.  ‘Why I to work harder?’ he protested.  ‘I will have good job in my father’s company in future.’ Xue’s Hamlet – tall, well-built, prone to violence, dressed in black jeans and an open-necked shirt, a blade tucked into his belt – seemed trapped in temperament,  as well as in body, in the limiting worldview of Claudius’ ‘Denmark’, despite the influence of his Horatio.  Physically, at least, he resembled his uncle more than his ghostly father, who was played by the same actor as the Player King.  Any sweetness in his nature was for Horatio’s eyes only.  The interpretation of this relationship was well-handled, despite being a little stereotypical: the macho Hamlet in black and the comparatively slight Horatio in white, and the suggestion that Hamlet’s misogyny, especially in relation to Ophelia, was linked to his sexuality.  Hamlet semi-secretly dating Horatio also changed this and other dynamics in the play.  Ophelia’s strident pursuit, despite (or because of) her increasing awareness that she was in competition with Horatio, put her on a direct collision course with the Prince of Denmark.  On a number of occasions he simply pushed her aside when she deliberately placed herself in his way, but in the ‘Get thee to a nunnery’ scene he threw her to the floor in what looked like a violent, anti-female sexual attack (and Ophelia fought back, only giving up when he threatened rape).  At this point, Claudius was able to say without doubt, ‘His love tends not that way.’  He needed no other evidence for the root of Hamlet’s ‘madness’.   Finally, Hamlet’s relationship with his mother was noticeably non-Freudian. (The Freudian reading of Hamlet and Gertrude’s relationship is a ‘cultural taboo’ too far, according to Taiwanese scholar Cheung Wai Fong in her work on recent Chinese film adaptations of Hamlet.) Thus, his anger appeared to be primarily on behalf of his dead father, perhaps bringing in a Confucian flavour after all, as filial piety is one of the most important codes in traditional Chinese society.  Also, despite Hamlet’s chastisement of his mother, before leaving Gertrude’s closet (literally her walk-in wardrobe) he knelt before her, a son once again showing submission to a parent.

Ophelia

Ophelia (Wang Sainan)

Wang Sainan, the eighteen-year-old undergraduate who played Ophelia, was a universal hit with the audience. Bringing in her dance training, hers was a very physical, but also a very controlled, Ophelia. ‘We’ve had quite a theme of strong Ophelias in these productions,’ Nicoleta commented afterwards.  I noticed that Laertes called Ophelia jie jie, which means elder sister.  This in itself fundamentally changed the dynamic between herself and her stage brother: as the only woman in the household (her mother being dead) and as the eldest child, she took on the role of 2^nd parent, aligning herself with Polonius against Laertes.  This was most humorously expressed when poor Laertes, about to board his ship, was spun around between father and sister as they took turns to lecture him.  Unlike the Polski Theatre production the night before there was no hint of incest in the family dynamic (see above).  As the actress was also very tall, Ophelia often seemed to dominate within the household physically as well as verbally.  Hamlet was the only male she couldn’t get the better of, and this power struggle between them – often physically expressed – became increasingly complex in the light of Horatio’s presence.  These scenes, and the scenes when she joined Horatio and Bernardo/Marcellus on the battlements to see the ghost, are what reminded Madalina Nicolaescu (University of Bucharest) of the heroine in a post-Liberation revolutionary ballet – something about the strong, angular tilt of Ophelia’s body, the strident, androgynous movements, like the statues outside Mao’s Mausoleum in Tiananmen Square, I thought.  The programme notes refer to Ophelia as ‘a smart, ambitious woman,’ trying to ‘master’ (!) the ‘socio-sexual realities of the world she inhabits’, and in the way she did this she stood in strong contrast to the queen.  Whereas Gertrude, in her low-cut, slinky dresses, used her sexuality to maintain centrality, Ophelia dressed in the smart trouser suit of a business woman, her pre-madness hair scraped back into a power-ponytail.  She was more class ‘monitor’ than foot-bound, oppressed woman, and I am almost certain (if my Chinese is to be trusted) that it was Ophelia who insisted that her father report Hamlet’s madness to the king.   Thus her determination to pursue a loveless marriage for her family’s gain and to get herself in between Hamlet and Horatio took on the urgency of a bidding war.  Ophelia and Horatio were present for large sections of the play where they would usually be off-stage.  Most significantly, she joined her father in the closet scene, thus witnessing his murder first hand.  During her subsequent mad scene it was unclear whether the blood stains on her torn shirt came from her own or from her father’s body. Of course, this scene seemed positively restrained after the literal bloodbath of Polski Theatre’s interpretation the night before, but it was nonetheless very powerful and still had its sickening moments, such as when, with a completely glazed expression, Ophelia began to chew strips of bloodied fabric before handing it out, covered in saliva, instead of flowers.  

Horatio

Horatio (Sun Qiang)

The presence of Horatio (Sun Qiang), as I have already mentioned, became the main obstacle between Hamlet and Ophelia.  Dressed in 1920s whites and creams, the slim, rather beautiful actor (a post-graduate student) immediately suggested Sebastian Flyte, although he turned out to be more Maurice.  Everything about him, his clothing, his bearing, his tone of voice, indicated that he belonged to another world from the court, and another world from his boyfriend, Hamlet.  It was inevitable that, so long as they remained in the corrupting influence of the court, Horatio’s influence could not triumph.  As I said earlier, the relationship between Hamlet and Horatio obviously changed the relationship between Hamlet and Ophelia, making the roots of Hamlet’s misogyny more complex, but it also altered Horatio’s relationship with Ophelia.   Horatio, like Ophelia, was on stage for large parts of this production, often just watching the action – he is, after all, the storyteller, ‘the Shakespeare’ (Sun Qiang).  But at key moments he also intervened in the action. For example, he pulled Ophelia off-stage, away from Hamlet, after she had just witnessed Hamlet’s murder of her father. This raised the question of: which person was he actually trying to help, Ophelia or Hamlet? It was clearly Ophelia who needed his aid, yet the suggestion was that Horatio was more interested in protecting Hamlet.  This in turn raised the larger question: who was having the greater influence on whom? Horatio on Hamlet? Or vice versa?  Here, off-stage dynamics also intervened in my reaction to on-stage events.  It appeared that Wang Sainan and Sun Qiang were close friends in reality, which made Horatio’s apparent leaving of his ethical senses all the more disquieting. 

When a kiss isn’t just a kiss

I’m not sure if it was simply because he was uncertain of his English so early in the day, but at breakfast in the hotel where everyone was lodged, the actor Sun Qiang had seemed as modest and diffident as he was onstage.  So it was ironic that he proved to be part of the most controversial element of the production.  For when Hamlet met Horatio (Ophelia and Barnardo/Marcellus being conveniently absent), they embraced for just a fraction longer than a Western hetero-normative environment allows.  When this was followed by a completely unambiguous gay kiss, I swear there was an audible gasp from the audience… It was like being back in 1987, when Johnny kissed Omar in My Beautiful Laundrette. Another dynamic to this moment in the performance was added by the fact that three representatives of the Chinese Embassy in Bucharest were sitting next to us in the front row.  For some people, like retired teacher Joan Griffiths from the UK, the surprise was not in the kiss, but in the fact that it was performed by Chinese actors, going against her expectations of China’s social conservatism.  For others it was the kiss that was problematic.  Madalina, such a fan of the strong Ophelia, got quite angry about it as we discussed it a few days later, sitting drinking coffee together in Bucharest.  ‘What I don’t understand is why they had to actualise it,’ she protested, as if this small action had been as explicit as the moment in the Polski Theatre’s play-within-a-play when two men simulated having sex with the player queen from in front and from behind…  ‘It was only a kiss,’ I said.  ‘Yes, but why actualise it?’  I felt the opposite.  I’ve seen several productions where a relationship between Hamlet and Horatio is hinted at, more where Horatio is played to be in love with an oblivious Hamlet, but this was the first production where I had seen it enacted and sustained throughout a performance, and not only as a sexual relationship but as an emotional one, in fact, as the central love story.  Of course, this added a further dimension to Horatio being the only person Hamlet can trust and the only person there to support him.  Afterwards, Stanley Wells (editor of the Oxford Shakespeare and Chairman of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust) said that he, too, had thought the relationship very well done: ‘And it’s all there in the text, you know.’  Interestingly, the physical contact between Horatio and Hamlet throughout the play – holding hands, resting heads on each other’s shoulders, sitting in an embrace – would not necessarily be read as homoerotic in a Chinese context.  In 1993, when I was first teaching at Shandong University, it was banned for girls and boys to date as undergraduates, so you never saw mixed couples.  However, homosocial intimacy was common.  Even now, particularly in more rural areas, you can see young men caress with no sense of this being a potentially sexual action.  When we discussed this at the post-production discussion, two female crew members cuddled each other chastely, one sitting on the other’s lap.  This cast light on what would otherwise have been a strange comment (to northern European ears, at least, where men rarely touch unless playing sport or being drunk). Xue (Hamlet) said, ‘It is easier for us [to act a gay relationship] because in life we are fast friends, so we can figure out what kind of action to make.’  Sun (Horatio) was quick to add, however, ‘For me the most obstacle is the kiss.  In China, in our culture, although we are fast friends it is very hard to do.’  Sun concluded that, because he had to spend so much time acting, but not speaking, playing Horatio was ‘exhausting’ and that, because of the gay kiss, ‘For me it is the hardest part I ever play.’  This aspect of the performance clearly traumatised him off-stage, although it was not evident at all on-stage, and he related it again and again to being Chinese. That Horatio was so difficult for him to play was surprising, however.  Afterall,  he had acted in a student production of Sarah Kane’s Blasted the year before…

Hamlet from China, Part 1: Reality TV, Zombies and Daemons? Shanghai Theatre Academy (P. R. China)

All photographs in this post (c) Saffron Walkling, 2010

See Part 2: When Hamlet Met Horatio here.

Hamlet: That is the Question was put on by the Richard Schechner Center for Performance Studies at the Shanghai Theatre Academy (STA), and directed by Benjamin Mosse and Richard Schechner (the studio theatre of the Teatrul National ‘Marin Sorescu’, Craiova, Romania: 28^th April, 2010)

‘Ophelia’ (Wang Sainan), me (Saffron Walkling) and ‘Horatio’ (Sun Qiang)

This was the highlight of the festival for me, partly because it reminded me of living and teaching in China, and because I ate breakfast with ‘Horatio’ and ‘Ophelia’. Twice.  I became quite STA-struck.  Oh yes, and it was rather good…

This was an unusual production in that the cast combined professional actors (Claudius), drama teachers (Gertrude, Hamlet) and students (Horatio, Ophelia, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern).  The cast and production team were Mainland Chinese, and the directors were American. Therefore, one of the questions for me was: to what extent was this a ‘western’ production and to what extent was it ‘Chinese’?  In the interview we conducted the next day, it was interesting to note how the ‘great’ Richard Schechner, who directed the 2007 and 2009 productions, was referenced in every answer.  This was despite the fact that Benjamin Mosse was the main director of this 2010 revival, and by comparing the programme notes with the performance we saw, he had made some small but significant changes.  ‘Schechner obviously controlled the whole thing,’ one of my colleagues commented afterwards.  I’m not so sure, however.  I think there was a certain amount of ‘face-work’ taking place, and Confucian reverence for ‘the Master’.  The Player King (Ma Junfeng) spoke with considerable authority about the use of Beijing Opera during the play within the play, which had been localised into the Beijing Opera form.  As in Elizabethan England, the best theatre troupes and actors would be summoned to perform at court. Furthermore, in a private conversation, Laertes (Wang Meng), one of the original cast members, explained the genesis of the production: ‘When we began this project, Schechner let us to read the play and come to our own understanding; then he gave us his understanding.  Our understanding was here’ (he held one hand six inches to the left of his face) ‘and Schechner’s was here!’ (he held his other hand six inches to the right). ‘So, Schechner let us to do more reading to bring us in to here,’ (he slowly moved his hand to in front of his nose) ‘and we explained to Schechner until he came to here…’ (he slowly moved his right hand to join the left).  ‘After long time, we met in middle,’ he concluded, satisfied. I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall in the rehearsal room.

Laertes (Wang Meng)

In some ways I felt it was the one production we saw which truly took all of its largely Romanian and/or English speaking audience into the imaginative space that is opened up when the spectators do not share the language or culture of the performers.   There were Romanian and English surtitles projected onto the wall, but due to a technical glitch, these were out of sync with the actors’ Mandarin Chinese.  The result was a happy one, nonetheless, as the audience was forced to pull itself away from the dominance of the written word and actually focus on the performance, although I feel that we missed a lot of the jokes, and some key interpretive moments.  With my limited Mandarin, I picked up that, as Polonius’ pontificated about different genres of drama, he had localised them into different regional opera forms.  Obviously, as we were attending the Worldwide Hamlet conference, the majority of the audience had a fairly good knowledge of the play.  Furthermore, key lines in the play (‘To be or not to be’, ‘Oh that such a noble mind’ etc) were delivered in English, allowing us to locate ourselves within the story.  What was fascinating was how varied the different understandings of this production were, particularly around Horatio/Hamlet/Ophelia, and how strongly these responses were influenced by people’s preconceptions of or experiences of China.  An older Romanian scholar saw secret police in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and in the red money envelopes slipped to them by Claudius, Mao’s Little Red Book. A young Polish scholar read the patriarchal oppression of Eastern women in the fate of Ophelia, whereas another older Romanian scholar saw her as a Red Guard! And as for the kiss between Hamlet and Horatio (addressed in my next post) Joan, a retired British teacher who had been born in China, exclaimed, ‘I can’t believe this is Chinese.  In fact, some of the cast must be Chinese American.  I can’t believe that Mainland Chinese would act this!’ I think this comment reflected her expectations of social conservatism in Chinese culture rather than her own conservatism.

Speaking of expectations, many in the audience had expected the play to be localised into a Chinese opera, much as Ryutopia’s Hamlet, two nights previously, had used Noh and other traditional Japanese forms to retell Shakespeare’s play.  ‘I wouldn’t have understood why it wasn’t Peking (Beijing) Opera if it hadn’t been for your paper,’ one delegate said to me later (my paper had been on Lin Zhaohua’s avant-garde, spoken drama Hamuleite).   The director of this STA production, Benjamin Mosse, explained during the interval why they too had opted for contemporary dress spoken drama:  ‘We didn’t want to exoticise the production’, he said, raising some interesting issues that we didn’t have time to address, but that  I will hopefully have the opportunity to discuss further in the future.  Personally, I found the STA adaptation’s engagement with contemporary Chinese forms and popular culture more fascinating. This is partly because I am working on the development of huaju (spoken drama) at the moment, and because I am interested in the crossover between theatre and media such as film and TV. And although Ma Junfeng (Head Player) later insisted ‘Beijing Opera influence every Chinese people life more or less’, my students insist that it’s only old people and laowai (foreigners) who ever seem to go to see it…

A central feature of this production was the use of cameras, filming the action and projecting it onto the wall at the back of the stage.  But, unlike Polski Theatre’s Metro CCTV cameras or David Tennant’s discovery of one of Claudius’ hidden cameras in the recent RSC Hamlet, the suggestion was not of surveillance but celebrity/reality TV. The red-waist-coated TV crew continually followed the protagonists around the stage, capturing their most intimate or painful moments in order to blaze them on the screens for public consumption.  This turned the tables on the king and Polonius during the ‘Get thee to a nunnery’ scene: no longer hidden behind an arras, their reactions to the scene were revealed to all as if they were contestants on Big Brother.  Polonius looked on hurt, bemused, and completely powerless while Hamlet, his daughter’s childhood friend and potential fiancé, physically and verbally abused her.  At the words ‘I loved you not!’, perhaps already subconsciously aware that Hamlet’s desires lay in another direction, Claudius’ face registered chilling confirmation of the danger he faced from his nephew/son. Zheng Xing (Claudius), a theatre and film actor, commented that the use of the cameras also added to the process of estrangement: ‘It was theatre but not theatre, film but not film, life but not life.’ And perhaps reality, but not reality?

Gertrude (Liu Wangling)

The dais, on which Claudius and the Queen were enthroned, later opened up to reveal itself to be a crate of earth: Ophelia’s grave.  After the fiasco of her burial, the dais was not closed, leaving the grave open throughout the final scenes. For me, one of the most powerful moments in the production was suddenly noticing that Claudius, realising that Gertrude had already drunk from the poisoned cup before he could stop her, had silently stepped into the open grave.  From there, he stoically awaited his execution.  At the very end of the production, all the characters – Hamlet, Claudius, Gertrude, Ophelia, Polonius, Laertes, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern – stood motionless in the grave, fixed stares on their faces: as if facing a firing squad, perhaps, or else rising en-masse from the dead. Only Horatio, in darkness, stood outside, from where he instructed the guards to shoot, simultaneously suggesting mass execution or his own self-destruction.  Earlier, after Ophelia’s death, there had been a strange moment of frenzied dancing by all these corpses and soon-to-be corpses, to rock music, with mops…  Several delegates, who clearly knew much more about the work of Richard Schechner than I did, assured me that this was typical of his work and was something to do with Shamanic ritual.  I had lived in China, what did I know about Chinese shamanism?  Nothing, I answered.  I had thought it was reference to zombie movies…

I found the mop motif slightly bizarre, but it gradually  captured my imagination.  These were typical Chinese cloth mops, with long wooden handles, just like the one I had in the corner of my bathroom in Jinan, that were used to different effect throughout the performance.  Their main symbolism was that ‘nothing could clean away the dirt in society’ (Yang Jungxia, stage manager).  Sometimes they were simply mops.  Sometimes they were quite comic, as in the beginning of the fencing scene when they became Hamlet’s and Laertes’ foils and the audience was encouraged to cheer for whoever they wanted to win.  But in other places they became threatening, rods for a beating that could do real damage.  When Ophelia entered mad, she used one first as a phallus, then as a weapon.  When she threw the mop away from her, crying he is ‘dead and gone’, it became an object of great pathos, too.

Doubling was also extremely effective.  As the actor playing the ghost also played the Player King, it raised questions about who was directing whom.  Hamlet repeated the lines of both the ghost and the Player King: ‘To me, the ghost and the Player King are the same’ (Xue Guanglei, Hamlet).  Thus, his dead father is closely manipulating Hamlet as he lays the ‘Mousetrap’.  When the dead Polonius re-entered as the priest about to inter Ophelia, it shocked the audience (compare Polonius reappearing as the gravedigger in Brook, Bouffes du Nord, 2000), but  it also emphasised the inseparability of Polonius and Ophelia in this production (see next post). Most interesting, however, was Claudius’ actual double, Little Claudius, played by the childlike Yin Lanjing, also doubling as Osric.  Little Claudius, according to ‘Big’ Claudius (Zheng Xing) is his soul and also ‘a kind of pet’.  In her catlike movements, she could ‘say something Claudius cannot express [in public]. For  example, Hamlet is a kind of threat; I can express this in my form’ (Yin).  She reminded me of a familiar or even a daemon (of the kind recently reimagined by Philip Pulman in his Dark Materials trilogy). Her presence had the added effect of centralising Claudius, whose state of mind became as important – if not more so – than Hamlet’s.  Zheng related this double back to the concepts of ‘environmental theatre’ that lay behind this production.  But as Benjamin Mosse announced, in his introduction to the performance, that he would not ‘discuss the ideas of meta, environmental and community theatre that we’re evoking’, I’ll just have to go off and read some Performance Theory…

Shanghai Theatre Academy cast and crew 2010

The above reflection is based on my notes taken during the performance, the programme notes and an interview with cast members and production team the morning after the performance, which was conducted by Nicoleta Cinpoeş (Worldwide Hamlet Conference organiser, University of Worcester), myself (University of York), Aneta Mancewitz (Kazimierz Wielki University) and April Chaplin (OCR).

Ophelia does a Hamlet: Polski Theatre (Poland)

 

A more formal review by me of this production is published in the journal Shakespeare, Volume 8, Issue 4, 2012 available by clicking here

Hamlet, performed by Polski Theatre (Wroclaw), directed by Monika Pęcikiewicz (Teatrul National ‘Marin Sorescu’, Craiova, Romania: 27^th April, 2010)

This production was the most controversial of the four I saw at the Hamlet themed International Shakespeare Festival in Craiova, Romania, with many at the conference reacting against it violently.  Personally, I found it disturbing and thought-provoking.  Like the Shanghai Theatre Academy’s adaptation, it was a very young production (the oldest cast member looked as if he was in his thirties); unlike the Shanghai adaptation, it didn’t struggle with transgressing the boundaries of traditional culture. In fact, it embraced transgression, as suggested by its neo-noir comics mise-en-scene.  Many saw this transgression as ‘gratuitous’ and ‘crude’.  However, having just returned from two weeks in Poland, where I was on Erasmus Teaching Mobility at the University of Silesia, my impression was that this production was doing something more than simply trying to shock.  Of course, it was trying to shock, too: there was nudity, simulated sex (quite a lot of simulated sex), and bucket-loads of blood.  However, the director’s last Shakespeare had been Titus Andronicus and the parallels between Ophelia and Lavinia were strongly drawn.  Sex is power: power is sex seemed to be the motto of the court of Denmark, and Gertrude, with her conical breasts and phallic beehive was its dominatrix, the queen of sadomasochistic sexploitation. The children, Hamlet, Ophelia and Laertes, were dull inconveniences in their parents’ lives.

Perhaps not Ophelia. The dark underside of this celebration of lasciviousness became apparent as Laertes left for France.  Polonius, who for a moment I thought was a priest because he wore a white collar under a black shirt, tore the siblings apart. He held Ophelia centre stage, fondling his daughter’s stomach, and then later, accidentally on purpose, his hand brushed her breast.  At this point I wanted to be sick.  Laertes left, powerless to help his sister.  Later, when Ophelia was loosed on Hamlet by her father and the king, she begged Gertrude to help her, but Gertrude, like the Queen of the Goths, walked away and left her to her fate.  Ophelia, instead of reading a prayer book was commanded by her father to strip for the bemused Hamlet.  Then, naked except for her knickers, she suddenly ran off stage, Hamlet running after her calling the actress’ name: Anna.  The actress (scripted of course) refused to play the role, to participate in this exploitation, not only of Ophelia’s body, but also of her own body for entertainment.  She eventually returned to finish the scene, wearing Hamlet’s jacket.  I found it incredible that some in the audience later described this production as all very clever but having no feeling.  When Ophelia lay on the floor and screamed with rage and pain, I knew exactly where she was coming from.  When she stood up again, she had decided to act.

Ophelia (c) Teatr Polski Wroclaw

Ophelia decentralised Hamlet to the extent that she spoke his ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy, and then feigned his madness.  In the most argued about scene in the play, Ophelia entered Claudius and Gertrude’s bathroom ‘mad’.  Blood gushed from between her legs and she repeatedly stabbed herself, whilst playfully skidding around in the gore.  But when Claudius and Gertrude eventually left in disgust, she snapped out of it and revealed that her dagger was from a joke shop, and that the blood was fake.  She shared the joke with Horatio, while they both smoked cigarettes and chatted.  One of the delegates complained that at this point the production had descended into parody, but I think it was simply illustrating that Ophelia, like Hamlet, could also put on an ‘antic disposition’. And even if it was parody, it didn’t last long.  As Ophelia sat on the edge of the bath, Horatio came up from behind and drowned her.  She hadn’t won after all.  Unfortunately, the surtitles were only in Romanian so I had to rely on other people’s understanding.  ‘Horatio was a double agent, working for Claudius’ said one.  ‘Horatio couldn’t stand to see Ophelia like that any longer, so killed her,’ said another. Either way, this Electra was silenced. See my blog on this production and the influence of Hamletmachine, Ophelia and Electra here.

Ophelia’s funeral (c) Teatr Polski Wrocław

Gertrude was the most interesting interpretation I have seen for a long time.  Apparently in control, again referencing the Queen of the Goths in Titus Andronicus, her sexual appetite turned out to be no more than the result of her own grooming by a society that saw women as objects.  She reminded me of Gilda in Woman on the Edge of Time by the end. It wasn’t only women who were exploited in this production, however.  Like the Shanghai Theatre Academy, Rosencrantz was also singled out for special abuse by Hamlet.  In the Chinese production, this abuse was possibly linked to the fact that she was played by a woman, and could be interpreted as part of a larger misogynistic attack.  In Polski Theatre’s imagining, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are part of the SM underworld.  Rosencrantz, the weakest character, has already fallen victim to Guildenstern and the Players.  His brutalisation by the previously meek Hamlet was (intentionally) sickening, and immediately preceded his violent attack on his mother, Gertrude, in which he attempted to sodomise her.

Player Queen and Gertrude (c) Teatr Polski Wroclaw

There was neither an opening scene nor a final act in this production.  Instead, the main characters sat on chairs in a row in front of the curtain, while a voiceover told the events.  I couldn’t help wondering if this had been so in earlier stagings of this performance, or whether, only two weeks after the Polish aircrash that had claimed the lives of Poland’s political and military leaders and leading figures in its arts, culture and society, the sight of a stage strewn with the bodies of an entire court would have seemed an act of tastelessness too far.

Interviews and clips in Polish available from (any translations would be gratefully received and acknowledged):

Banzi Opera ‘Merchant of Venice’

Xialou threatens 'Antonio' (c) Taiwan Bangzi on Facebook

 

Taiwan Bangzi Opera: A Tribute to Shakespeare, Greenwood Theatre, KCL, Sept 11 2009.

I went along to this performance full of excitement and expectation.  Firstly, I was wondering how the traditional opera company would appropriate a story which is so loaded for a western audience. (Intriguingly, Li Ruru gave a presentation at Nottingham Ningbo in 2008 in which she introduced a production of Merchant in which the Shylock character was simply a greedy Chinese moneylender, removing any reference of race or religion from the storyline.)  Aside from this, I have missed the ‘strange sounds’ of Chinese opera: the high-pitched singing, initially unrecognisable as such to untrained western ears, the frantic dungdungdungdung of the cymbal, the strains of the erhu, all accompanied by acrobatics, elaborate costumes and stylized gestures, which nine times out of ten filled the afternoon television schedules (between documentaries on road-building) when I first lived in the People’s Republic of China.  I would certainly get my opera fix at this performance, although I found the transformation of the play’s characters a little more problematic.

 We saw two extracts, ‘The Bond’ and ‘The Debate’. In the post-Holocaust west, it is difficult to see Shylock portrayed as a comic villain, one minute testing his blade on his boot, the next trembling with cowardice at the act he is about to perform – at which the audience here has no choice but to laugh, because in accordance with the rules of the genre, this confrontation between Shylock and his enemies is clearly meant to be a funny scene.  But then Shylock is not Jewish but, according to the subtitles, a Saracen.   Although there were ancient Jewish communities in China, most notably the one at Kaifeng in the west of the country, this relocating of Shylock’s ethnic and religious identity does make sense, however, in a Chinese context, as the Silk Road traders led to the significant Muslim presence in China which remains to this day. Yet the replacement of a Jewish Shylock with a Muslim Central Asian Shylock creates its own discomfort if put into the context of current tensions in Xingiang between the Muslim Uyghur and Han, or the worldwide context of post 9/11 Islamaphobia.  Because the opera’s comedy relies on racial stereotypes, there is a sense that Shylock becomes a figure of ridicule both for ‘Gratiano’ and for the audience (as he probably would have been for the play’s early modern audience).  The turbaned, bearded Xia Lou (Shylock) is dressed in pantomime Persian garb of colourful brocades and heavy jewellery, and using animated, over-emphasised body movements and facial expressions.  This costuming of ethnicity immediately emphasises his Otherness, especially when he is juxtaposed throughout with the mediaeval Chinese (or Cathay), dressed in their pale, simple robes, their hair hanging loose, their manner self-contained. This is, of course, at odds with most contemporary readings/performances of Merchant, where by the trial scene, we attempt to distance ourselves from Gratiano’s goading.  (Even ‘Hath not a [Saracen] eyes’, which is moved to the trial scene, is used here to underscore Shylock’s dogged determination for revenge rather than work as a plea to the audience for the humanity of all peoples.) When Shylock is finally defeated, his punishment, including a ban on ever wearing such ‘outlandish clothes’ is greeted general with laughter both on-stage and in the audience.  The ridiculous, audacious  foreigner has had his come-uppance.  I find myself sitting in the audience unsure how to respond.  The performance is enormous fun, but every politically correct nerve-ending in my body is screaming ‘what about gas-chambers, lynching, gay-bashing, stop-and-search, Guantanamo…?’ Then all the action stops, and Shylock steps forward to sing his final aria, and I am not quite sure why (perhaps a slight change in tone of voice or facial expression?) but he is no more the foreign clown or the evil outsider, but suddenly a tragic hero.  In an impassioned diasporic song, that seems to speak as much to the losses of overseas Chinese as to any other community, the performance suddenly realigns itself to my expectations.

At the post-performance discussion the next day, Professor Perng, the English translator, addressed some of these issues.  Their Merchant was intended to tackle the problem of racism in contemporary Taiwan, although as religious conflict is not so prevalent, this had been removed.  Moreover, to Chinese speakers, many jokes and puns in the language would help reveal this agenda.  Shylock’s family name, Xia, is synonymous with the meaning ‘Chinese’, whereas the family name of the Portia figure is common among ethnic Chinese of Muslim descent.

It would be interesting to think further about translation.  Professor Perng Ching Hsi, a lecturer in English and drama, translated Shakespeare’s text into Mandarin Chinese, attempting to keep close to the original.  Professor Chen Fang, a lecturer in Chinese theatre, transformed his translation into the language, form and conventions of Bangzi Opera.  Perng then re-translated the Chinese opera back into English for the subtitles.

The figure of the miserly money lender is already a stock character in traditional Chinese drama, according to Zhang Xiaoyang (1996, pp74-5), who compares Shylock to Jia Ren in the comedy A Slave to Money. 

Finally, this production featured an all-female cast, reversing Shakespeare’s original. From the Ming dynasty until the Qing, women were outlawed from appearing on stage in China.  Now, it appears, women may be more interested in performing traditional opera forms than men.