By
Fox Butterfield
New York
Times
November,
1979
Peking--“With all his doubts
and indecision, Hamlet is far from an ideal revolutionary hero,” observed Toby
Robertson, the director of the Old Vic Theater Company.
But a Chinese audience earlier this month responded enthusiastically, and
knowledgeably, to the premiere performance here of the Old Vic’s production of
Shakespeare’s tragedy about the doleful Danish prince.
Although a simultaneous translation into Chinese by local actors was
available over earphones, a majority of the spectators were content to listen to
the Elizabethan original.
“They are a really civilized lot,” said Derek Jacobi, the British
actor who played Hamlet. Many people in the audience had read “Hamlet” in school
or had seen the film version by Laurence Olivier, which was shown in China
earlier this year.
The Old Vic is on a nine-performance tour of Peking and Shanghai; the
visit here is part of a seven-country itinerary, including Scandinavia and
Greece. From here, the 26-member
troupe heads for Melbourne and Adelaide, with Sydney being its final stop in
mid-December. This is the first
appearance by a British dramatic group in China since the Communists came to
power in 1949. The visit by the
troupe is being sponsored by the British Council, the government agency that is
roughly equivalent to America’s International Communications Agency, what used
to be called the United States Information Service.
While many people in the audience were familiar with “Hamlet,”
virtually none had seen, or even heard of, the British Broadcasting
Corporation’s television dramatization of Robert Grave’s “I, Claudius,”
in which Mr. Jacobi also starred and made his public mark with both British and
American viewers. The Chinese
audiences were clearly unprepared for his exuberant, almost uninhibited style of
acting, which is far more naturalistic than that permitted to Chinese actors by
their theatrical canon. Chinese
acting today remains heavily influenced by the stylized traditions of the Peking
Opera, which is symbolic and mimetic, rather than realistic:
a headdress with long feathers signifies a general; showing an oar
suggests riding a boat; pacing about the stage indicates making a journey.
Traditionally, the concern in Chinese theater, as in literature, has not
been with the individual psyche; people always had a specified role in life to
play, rather than spend their time trying “to find” themselves.
On stage, the result for Western audiences is that Chinese acting
sometimes seems mannered and wooden, giving to frozen stares and exaggerated
smiles.
Mr. Jacobi, by contrast, alternately disconcerted and exhilarated the
Chinese with the range of his impassioned interpretation.
One moment he shouted, the next he whispered.
He delivered one soliloquy lying on the stage.
And he embraced his mother the queen in her bedchamber with what seemed
like more than a son’s affection.
Judging by the rush for the sandy-haired, bearded actor at a cocktail
reception afterward, he was a success. Many
of the Chinese said they preferred him to the queen, whose hoarse voice and
bounteous cleavage was judged insufficiently royal for Chinese taste.
Mr. Jacobi and Mr. Robertson, the director, were caught off guard by some
questions the Chinese put to them. “Why
are your costumes so different from those in the Olivier movie version?”
several inquired.
“They seem to think there is only one ‘Hamlet,’ only one way to do
it,” said Mr. Jacobi. “Now I suppose we have superseded Olivier.”
The Chinese were also puzzled by the Old Vic’s decision not to use a
proscenium curtain. The entire play is performed on a single set representing the
dark brown mottled walls of Elsinore, the castle, with no curtain.
“They asked us, ‘Have you stopped using the curtain altogether in the
West?’” Mr. Robertson related.
“I get the impression they have been cut off so long they want
extraordinary generalizations,” Mr. Robertson, a tall, jolly man, added.
“They want to know exactly how a play is done, no questions about its
content, please.”
In Peking, laughter came at an unexpected passage during the play’s
performance. In the gravediggers’
scene, when Ophelia’s body is being prepared for burial after she has drowned,
there is a discussion over whether she has the right to proper Christian burial
since she evidently committed suicide.
“If she were not a gentlewoman, she would not be buried on consecrated
ground,” remarks one of the gravediggers.
To the Chinese, that was a reminder of one of the hottest current issues
here: the special privileges of
high-ranking Communist Party officials.
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