Which Way China?

Serge Soric and Song Ru Hui in Consumed

The tour of Consumed came to an end at Chickenshed, our local theatre.  Big experiment for them, as they've not received shows before - and lovely to see that it was such a success there.  One of the reasons we got such good audiences was that Lucy and her team had been working with the Youth Theatre there on the Intercult project - so there was already a lot of engagement with the play's areas of concern.  And we were able to to show the young people's work as part of the Which Way China? day we presented on the Saturday, as a sort of symposium around the production.

Last week, I went back to Leeds University, for another symposium, this one around Staging China, with lots of scholars and theatre-makers from China and across the world.  So I've been spending a lot of time thinking and talking about the wider issues around the play.  Nice to do this at the end of a project - it reminds you of what the piece is actually about and why it matters to do it.

Consumed is about a globalised, technologically inter-connected world.  It is also very much about difference within that world, and the fact that China remains emphatically, powerfully distinct from the West in cultural terms.  That difference, as the conversations of the last couple of weeks have made clear, is not confined to language or culture in its narrow sense.  It runs through the whole way of thinking and being.  So people who imagine that China's rapid change is an evolutionary process taking the nation towards a Western model of liberal democracy are profoundly mistaken.  China will go her own way - and our task is to find how to live with that.  The intercultural theatre we are making with Chinese artists is a cultural experiment around a much larger political question - how do we, as distinct cultures, jointly inhabit this connected, globalised space?  How do we live with difference?

The Leeds conference threw some of the differences into very sharp relief.  On the first day, there were two acting workshops - one with Zoë Waterman, who was Greg Doran's assistant on the RSC's Orphan of Zhao, the other with Tian Qinxin, Artistic Director of the National Theatre of China.  The RSC workshop was, I suspect, intended by the organisers to be about the approach that had been taken to The Orphan of Zhao - after all, the conference was about Staging China.  In fact, it was about the RSC's approach to Shakespearean text, with very little acknowledgment that many people in the room spoke very little English, or (perhaps more interestingly) viewed English as a second language, and English culture from the outside.  I had a lot of fund playing Benedick in Much Ado, but, as so often with the UK theatre establishment, I felt the real questions were simply being avoided.

Tian Qinxin was extraordinary.  She is a small, soft-spoken woman, who habitually dresses in an old-fashioned Chinese scholar's robe, and little round glasses.  Her workshop consisted largely of provoking us to be expressive in a whole range of different ways.  "Be an apple.  Express it through your eyes.  Can your partner tell whether you are a red apple or a green apple?"  "Look through the seats.  See through the walls.  See outside.  You must really look - not pretend to look".  "He was good.  Everybody else was very bad."  The model of "director as master", which is very prevalent in Chinese theatre, and which I recall from Zhang Ruihong, was clearly there.  But so was a great humour, and a real passion to teach what she was aware was a culturally specific approach.  The RSC workshop began by disclaiming that it was Western.  It was.

So often the West assumes that its way is "universal", and that it is the yardstick by which other cultures must be measured.  That is what we have to move beyond.  There is no universal and there is no yardstick.  There is simply flux.

Hamlet without the Prince

Some time ago, Nisha booked for us to see the RSC Hamlet in the West End, knowing it starred David Tennant, who manages to be a very fine actor as well as being a star. In case anybody doesn't know, he's put his back out, and Edward Bennet, who was playing Laertes, has moved up to the title role. It does seem a bit odd to see a comparative unknown playing the title role in what is clearly a star vehicle - Patrick Stewart, Penny Downie, Oliver Ford Davies..... but it's also rather nice to see an actor playing the part who is not at all showy and doesn't have a known persona to fill or undermine. In fact, he's very good.

During the first half, we were sitting miles away. The production seemed to be about the mirrored set, the sound system and Penny Downie's enormous dress. In the second half, because lots of Dr. Who fans hadn't bothered to turn up, we moved down to the stalls, from where it was a different play. The tourist theatre element vanished - and it became almost entirely about psychology, and was very beautifully acted. I'm not sure I like Gregory Doran's direction much: he's concentrated on the family play, and lost any sense of a radical edge in the process, so it feels very safe. Fortinbras is reduced to a token entrance - all his lines in the final scene are cut. And the "court" simply stand around and watch as the protagonists interact. But that's true of much RSC work these days - it's lost any social dimension.