Worlds Elsewhere (67 page)

Given my transcultural discoveries in India, I was fascinated to read about a production of
Romeo and Juliet
mounted in Shanghai in 1938, which blended Tian Han's translation with dialogue taken from the Hollywood film version of 1936 with Norma Shearer and Leslie Howard. I was even more entranced by a film called
Yi jian mei
(‘A Spray of Plum Blossom'), an ambitious 110-minute silent version of
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
from 1931. Partly available on YouTube, the film is imaginatively relocated to contemporaneous Shanghai and Guangzhou and depicts two strong-willed modern women as they journey in search of their wayward men. In one daring scene Shi Luhua/Silvia, played by the huge movie star Lin Chuchu, even dons uniform, having supplanted Hu Lunting/Valentine as the chief of the military police.

From the late 1930s onwards, however, theatre was heavily curtailed, first by the war with the Japanese and then by the conflict between the nationalists and the communists. Theatres were closed, actors and directors called up to fight. In the museum at the Beijing People's Art Theatre I saw their photographs, beaming young recruits joyfully preparing to do battle against the hated Japanese.

One picture made me pause. It came from 1942 and a cultural symposium held in the city of Yan'an – a black-and-white group shot, taken at the start of talks to develop the guiding principles of Chinese communist art. In the centre, despite the graininess of the image, was a figure immediately recognisable. He wore a donkey jacket, thick black hair sprouting either side of his bald pate. Mao Zedong.

It wasn't just the NCPA trying to find a new audience for Shakespeare in anniversary year. A few months before I arrived, the National Theatre of China's new
Romeo and Juliet
had opened. The production was big news, starring Li Guangjie and Yin Tao, both screen idols – Li known for boyish roles in Hong Kong movie rom-coms and action flicks, Yin for an eyelash-fluttering series of empresses and concubines in television historical epics, China's hugely popular period drama.

The director was Tian Qinxin, one of the few female theatre-makers to have developed a career in China. Trained in Beijing before living for a time in New York, she represented a different brand of theatre to that made by 1980s-trained directors such as Lin Zhaohua: aware of Chinese traditions but export-friendly and savvily commercial. With a sharp eye for a headline, Tian had called
Romeo and Juliet
a ‘Chinese love story' and pointed up its relevance to contemporary debates about marriage. She also made it known that the idea of doing the play had occurred to her while visiting Stratford-upon-Avon – yet another Chinese tourist to stand where Wen Jiabao stood, outside the Birthplace.

Three days after I arrived in Beijing I was sitting in a light-filled modern studio across from Temple of Heaven Park. While acolytes fussed and Tian prepared tea – an elaborate ritual that revealed there to be a hot-water tap somehow plumbed into the desk – I sized up the room. Glossy design books, downlights, expensive-looking porcelain glistening on the blonde-wood shelves … Only a discreet row of neat gold statuettes on the other side of the room hinted that Tian's real business was theatre.

With neatly cropped short hair, and clad in an elegantly tailored linen trouser suit, she was open and affable. By the time she was born in 1969 in Beijing, her family had resided in the imperial capital for nearly three centuries. As a child she had wanted to be a painter, but the Cultural Revolution, which had begun three years earlier, made this impossible. Under permanent suspicion because of their aristocratic connections, her family had dispatched her to a traditional opera school.

She first became excited by foreign drama as a teenager, when she attended China's first-ever Shakespeare festival in 1986 – a pivotal moment in Chinese appreciation of the playwright, during which the newly founded Shakespeare Society of China oversaw a remarkable twenty-eight productions in Beijing and Shanghai over a two-week period. Tian had seen as many of the shows as she could, and recalled with particular fondness an
Othello
by the China Railway Drama Company. Although her homeland was hardly free of tensions between the Han majority and other ethnic groups, it was a measure of how different Chinese understandings of the play were, she explained, that it was staged not as a tragedy of race but of class.

Her interest had swelled in 1993, when Tian was among an early generation of Chinese people allowed to indulge in the ultimate cultural luxury: the package tour to the UK. In Stratford, she bought a statue of the playwright (£7, she remembered: a lot of money for a Chinese tourist at the time) and, upon returning to Beijing, placed it carefully alongside the statue of the Buddha in her apartment. She laughed: she had ‘invited' Shakespeare into her life, as one might a deity.

Her early theatre work had been contemporary, but in 2008 Tian was invited to direct a version of
King Lear.
Taking a cue from television, she adapted it as lavish historical epic. Lear became a fourteenth-century emperor; instead of daughters he had sons. It was called simply
Ming Dynasty.
She had been struck by similarities between the life of Zhu Yuanzhang, who under his official name Hongwu became the first
Ming emperor, and that of Lear. A peasant who rose to power because of his military genius, Hongwu became increasingly unpredictable and despotic in old age.

‘In
King Lear,
there was this question of who would inherit the throne. There are many similarities. One man's confusion led to the catastrophe of a whole country.'

Catastrophe, however, was not on the cards in
Ming Dynasty.
Tian, like the Restoration playwright and adapter Nahum Tate, had given
King Lear
a happy ending. The tragedy became a play-within-the-play, performed for the edification of the real emperor and his court; an augury of what could happen if China was not ruled correctly. ‘This was a learning experience for him, an experience of growth and reflection.'

So in her version Lear survived?

She nodded. ‘All the fights among his sons were only tests, to see who would be ready. In the play-within-the-play, everyone dies, but in the
real
play the emperor gave his throne to the youngest son. The Chinese believe the emperor is the son of heaven, so it's heaven that makes all the decisions, not the emperor. The emperor was clear-minded, he knew what he wanted. It was not a man going mad.'

It was an arresting thought,
King Lear
without the madness, but already we were on to her new
Romeo and Juliet.
I was surprised to hear that it was not in fact new, but an adapted version of a staging Tian had first created in 2012 with the National Theatre of Korea. That had been quite different, she said. The setting there was the Cultural Revolution: Romeo was a Red Guard, Juliet a young dancer. Although Mao was never depicted on stage, Romeo quoted his speeches liberally.

Why had she chosen that setting?

‘I was still in elementary school when the Cultural Revolution ended in 1976, so my memories aren't distinct. But I do remember that although for adults it was a time of pain and suffering, for children it was a time of anarchy. That was how I imagined
Romeo and Juliet
to be.'

But this was also where problems had begun. Working with the Koreans, Tian was given free rein to depict historical events as she wished, but difficulties arose with the possibility of a transfer to China with Chinese actors. Tian was vague on the details, but it seemed that she had come under pressure to alter the scenario to something less problematic. Most of the script stayed, translated from Korean back into Chinese, but the action now took place in a fictional mainland
town during something resembling the present day, with what China Central Television (who devoted a glowing report to the show) described as ‘bicycles, sunglasses and hip-hop dancing'. With its lingering shots of gyrating youngsters, the CCTV report gave no clue that the earlier production – or its vexatious setting – had ever existed. All the newspaper articles I read did likewise.

What had happened? I couldn't get Tian to say. If she found the requirement to compromise problematic, she gave no hint of it. ‘Personally I'm not very interested in politics,' she said. ‘Setting a play in that period isn't a matter of politics.'

Setting
Romeo and Juliet
in the Cultural Revolution wasn't political?

I sensed the translator stiffening. Tian smiled, and started again. ‘The government of today is still reflecting on the Cultural Revolution. They don't like their old wounds to be shown again to the rest of the world.' The smile was polite but steely; I could push if I wanted, but the door was closed.

The routine was wearily familiar. Speaking again to Lin Zhaohua at the Beijing People's Art Theatre a few days earlier, I'd found it impossible to get him to admit there was any political dimension to his work. His collaborations with the dissident writer Gao Xingjian, who had later fled China? No comment. A production of
Hamlet
staged a few months after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, where the student hero morphed into a faceless bureaucrat? No relevance to contemporary events. A version of
Richard III
where the hero bore remarkable visual similarities to former premier Jiang Zemin? Purely accidental. Even
Coriolanus,
a story about a military commander who cannot adjust to the sordid compromises of
realpolitik,
was nothing to do with politics, Lin insisted. It felt like a dance, or a boxing match, ducking and weaving around what could and could not be said.

Talking with Tian, I felt I understood a little more. Making theatre in China – especially in a large state-funded arts complex – was a sophisticated game, involving a delicate series of negotiations. One might imply any number of things in a production (especially if the parallels were subtle), but if anyone asked, it was best to smile and plead innocence. Politics was for other people. Keep the controversy on stage.

Tian and I edged into talking about a recent play,
Chimerica,
by the British playwright Lucy Kirkwood, which had become a West End hit. Tian had seen it during a visit to London. Semi-fictionalised, the script focused on the so-called ‘Tank Man', the nameless Chinese citizen who
had famously been photographed standing in front of a row of tanks during the Tiananmen Square protests. The image – along with any mention of the protests – had been erased from the record in mainland China, and was still blocked on search engines by the ‘great firewalk'. At first, Tian said, she assumed the whole story was made up.

Would it be possible, I asked, to stage
Chimerica
here?

She laughed lightly. ‘Those questions should be left to the government.'

I couldn't resist one final shove. She claimed that setting
Romeo and Juliet
during the Cultural Revolution wasn't a political decision; would it have been if she had followed
Chimerica
‘s lead, and set the play during the 1989 protests instead? A youthful cast, warring generations, love across the barricades …

Tian placed her teacup carefully on the desk. Her answer did not come immediately. ‘I cannot imagine this yet,' she said.

Keen to find out how Shakespeare operated in print as well as on stage, I arranged a meeting with Jo Lusby, managing director of Penguin China. The Penguin offices were in a gleaming silver tower near Beijing's unromantically named Third Ring Road.

While I waited at reception, seven floors up, I looked down at the city below: a vast and relentless expanse of towers, turrets, parks and flyovers, all slowly being dipped in the molten sun. At street level, I'd found Beijing overwhelming, almost steroidally huge. The six-lane highway, ostensibly a normal road, that roared past the door of my apartment. The towering cliffs of hotels and office blocks, emblazoned with neon signs so weirdly intense that at night they painted everything – walls, trees, windscreens, litter bins, grass verges – with strange colouring.

It hadn't helped that for my first four days here, the air was so polluted it had been almost unbreathable: skies the colour of dirty bathwater, dusky and deadened light that made it look as though the city was permanently in the grip of a solar eclipse. The night before, though, there had been a ferocious storm; today the atmosphere was clear. I'd been astonished to find it was possible to walk around outside for longer than ten minutes without my throat burning and my eyes beginning to stream.

Lusby appeared beside me: smartly dressed, with wispy blonde hair and a bluff Mancunian accent. She indicated the sky outside the windows. ‘Normally we call it Beijing blue.'

Beijing
blue?

‘You know, not
actual
blue. Blue that isn't really blue. Beijing blue.' She sighed contentedly. ‘But today, I think it's blue.'

Wry and engagingly direct, Lusby had an experienced outsider's perspective on the joys and frustrations of working in China. She'd been here for seventeen years, first coming out after teaching English in Japan, then wangling a job with a Chinese magazine publisher. In 2005, she heard that Penguin were looking to set up an office in China, and had run it ever since.

In a sleek white meeting room jammed full of Peter Rabbit merchandise and a rainbow of Jamie Olivers, she guided me towards the bottom line. In Europe and America, publishing had been in a dark place: declining sales and increased digital competition, stuck in the jaws of the credit crunch. In China, however, the outlook could barely be brighter. Book sales were growing at over 10 per cent annually. The 2013 figures suggested they stood at 50 billion yuan (about £5 billion) each year, numbering in excess of 400,000 titles. Bestsellers regularly sold more than 3 million copies, well into
Fifty Shades of Grey
and
Da Vinci Code
territory. Little wonder that foreign publishers wanted a slice of the action.