Re-Routing Intercultural Theatre?: A Chinese Perspective on the Royal Shakespeare Company’s The Orphan

of Zhao

Wei Feng*

Shandong University, Jinan, China

An Overview of Intercultural Theatre Since the 20th Century

Defined by Patrice Pavis (1996, p. 8) in his seminal The Intercultural Performance Reader as ‘hybrid forms drawing upon a more or less conscious and voluntary mixing of performance traditions traceable to distinct cultural areas,’ intercultural theatre since the 20^th century is perceivably dominated by two trends represented by the West (Europe and USA) and East (particularly East Asia). This is summarised by Eugenio Barba (2005, p. 102): ‘We in the West have often envied the Asians their theatrical knowledge, which transmits the actor’s living work of art from one generation to another. They have envied our theatre’s capacity for confronting new themes and the way in which it keeps up with the times.’ In other words, whilst Westerners borrowed Asian theatrical forms, Asian theatres staged Western plays, although the aims differed.

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W. B. Yeats, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Bertolt Brecht, and Antonin Artaud (in the first half of the 20^th century), as well as Jerzy Grotowski, Richard Schechner, Ariane Mnouchkine, Peter Brook, Robert Wilson, and Eugenio Barba (in the second half) drew tremendously on rituals and traditional theatres in China, Japan, India, Korea, and Indonesia to build their own theatres. More often than not, they were more interested in Asian theatres’ stylised performing forms than textual legacies, probably because Western culture boasts a vast reservoir of plays from ancient Greece, to Shakespeare, to Ibsen. A general critique of their formalistic pursuit is that they were merely plundering the East for exoticism and inspiration without concern for their quintessence, as observed by Brian Singleton (2010, p. 41): ‘Asian theatres, for all of these practitioners, were treated as the crucible of formalism, and their performative vocabularies were used as the templates for the search for a new form of theatre.’ Chief among their critics is Indian scholar Rustom Bharucha (1993, p. 14) who identifies those ‘borrowing, stealing and exchanging from other cultures’ as ‘a continuation of colonialism.’

Further critiques resound in Interculturalism and Performance: Writings from PAJ (1991) edited by Bonnie Marranca and Gautam Dasgupta, a collection of articles written predominantly to problematise these intercultural practices. One problem with formalism is that it was usually misleading and incorrect due to lack of sufficient knowledge: ‘art fanciers admired the outside but did not see the power and meaning inherent in them; anthropologists have analyzed them purely as symbols’ (Turner 1991, p. 178). Another problem with formalism, as exhibited by Robert Wilson’s works, was postmodern playfulness which abused parody and pastiche by manipulating cultural differences, ‘where [no] cultural exchange can effectively occur and [no] new hybrid identities can emerge’ (Knowles 2010, p. 4).^[1] There were few, if any, adaptations which attempted to stage Asian texts: for instance, Brecht’s rewriting of an ancient Chinese play, Huilan Ji [The Chalk Circle] and Brook’s disputed staging of The Mahabharata. It is necessary to clarify the connotation of adaptation with Linda Hutcheon (2006, p. xiv): ‘deliberate, announced, and extended revisitations of prior works.’ She (ibid., p. 8) particularly emphasises ‘[a]n creative and an interpretive act of appropriation/salvaging,’ which differentiates adaptation from translation. Brecht did not represent Chinese culture in his adaptation, but instead tremendously altered the source’s plot and historical background so that the source was unrecognisable. Brook’s adaptation, meanwhile, was controversial because of his casual attitude to the Hindu holy text which, according to Erika Fischer-Lichte (2014, p. 8), should not bear transcultural reshaping. The ethics of adapting holy texts isolated Brook’s adaptation from others and thus made it atypical.

Despite Brecht’s and Brook’s renditions, the majority of Western intercultural pieces featured an overemphasis on Eastern forms and ignorance of its texts, which demonstrates that the West has need for neither Eastern plays, nor the ideology beneath, particularly because of the lack of sufficient translation and speakers of non-European languages - as well as the dominance of Western values. Asian traditions served as merely an instrument to inspire and justify Western practitioners’ innovation, to amaze audiences with exotic mysteriousness, and to solve interior problems without outlook for exchange.

Meanwhile, non-Western traditional theatres were adapting Western classics (Shakespeare, Ibsen, Brecht, Beckett, etc.) for different purposes: to import Western ideology, to reinvigorate ancient forms, to obtain a ticket to international festivals, and to appeal to young audiences. Practitioners from Chinese opera, kabuki, noh, kathakali represented by Taiwan’s Contemporary Legend Theatre, Japan’s Yukio Ninagawa and Singapore’s Ong Keng Sen, were famous for blending Western classical texts and traditional Asian forms as well as their zeal for international markets. While some of them, noticeably local adaptations of Shakespeare, were accused by Western scholars of simplification due to insufficient exploration into theme or characterisation,^[2] many did open up possibilities for reinterpreting Shakespeare and destabilising existing normalities in the local. Therefore, despite likely misinterpretation and distortion, some creative adaptations of foreign texts by non-Western traditional theatres contributed to both the source and the target culture, as did Brecht’s rendition of Chalk Circle.

There emerges from the above cases an alarming phenomenon: the centrality of Western texts as means of communication, because non-Western texts were hardly touched. This seemingly two-way intercultural exchange is problematic. Daphne P. Lei’s concept ‘Hegemonic Intercultural Theatre’ (HIT) is useful here. According to Lei (2011, p. 571), the dominant form of intercultural theatre in the contemporary world is still confined by HIT, ‘a specific artistic genre and state of mind that combines First World capital and brainpower with Third World raw material and labor, and Western classical texts with Eastern performance traditions.’ The biggest problem with this phenomenon is that ‘HIT limits and interrupts cultural flow from the East’ (ibid., p. 573), which consolidates Western discourse. This is testified by the ignorance of ideologically and culturally loaded Eastern texts. What happens if an Asian text is represented in the West, in a way different from both Brecht and Brook, namely, a secular play adapted with recognisable preservation of the source’s cultural elements? A clue to this might derive from The Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2012 adaptation of a classical Chinese play: Zhaoshi Gu’er [The Orphan of Zhao] (hereafter referred to as The Orphan)}⁶

The RSC’s adaptation of The Orphan originally written by Ji Junxiang in the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368), stood distinctively amongst Chinese opera’s intercultural activities. Before the 21^st century, the West’s appropriation of Chinese theatrical tradition mostly focused on stage conventions, of which the most famous case was Bertolt Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt [alienation effect], allegedly inspired by Beijing opera master Mei Lanfang; while classical Chinese plays were less valorised. Even if classical Chinese plays were adapted, they were either distanced from the source or were considerably and deliberately reshaped, as manifest in several early modern European adaptations of The Orphan¹¹ and Peter Sellars’s postmodern rendition of Mudan Ting [The Peony Pavilion] (1998).¹⁸ The Orphan, however, exhibited a different look. Firstly, it avoided appropriating Chinese opera’s performing vocabularies, as Director Gregory Doran (2012) wrote in the RSC’s blog after seeing Beijing Opera’s actor training in Shanghai: ‘We cannot possibly learn the styles and the craftsmanship of the opera that these actors have spent years perfecting. And it would be insulting to imagine that we could do so.’ His ^{[3] [4] [5]}

words differentiate him from Barba, Brecht, etc. who misread Chinese opera’s forms and principles. Secondly, the RSC managed to preserve the entire plot of this story - or rather, it made studies on the different versions of the story. Instead of borrowing several useful motifs, which Brecht did in his Caucasian Chalk Circle, it attempted to represent China with detailed surface resemblance to Chinese culture; it also differs from Brook in the nature of the play, a secular rather than a holy text. The RSC’s adaptation thus offered audiences and scholars a new lens through which to investigate intercultural encounters initiated by Westerners in the new century. The significance of this adaptation lay in its re-routing of intercultural adaptations, which this chapter will investigate. What this chapter attempts to contribute to the field is to reveal that Chinese plays can be provocative against stereotyped Western formalism that normally ends in inaccurate reading, and to examine how Chinese texts are handled by Shakespeare’s descendants, who are more capable of writing stories than creating theatrical forms.

To theorise theatrical interplays between cultures, theatre historian Erika Fischer-Lichte (2014, p. 11) coined the term ‘interweaving performance cultures.’^[6] According to her perception, in intercultural encounters, performing elements which resemble strands from different cultural origins constantly interweave based on what has already been interwoven. Her term not only addresses cultural exchanges that have taken place in history, but also highlights the unending process which constantly generates new aesthetics. Her paradigm, though, does not have sufficient reflection on the subjects of interweaving, as cultures are interwoven rather than interweaving. Departing from her argument that the ‘process of weaving is not necessarily smooth and straightforward’ (ibid., p. 11), this chapter emphasises the role of adaptor in the result of intercultural adaptation. During weaving, adaptors choose and handle the material according to their own logic: as individuals from certain cultural and historical backgrounds, they have criteria for what is normal and acceptable for local audiences, which to strangers might be completely novel and unacceptable.

Collective cultural legacy cannot be dispensed with for another reason: adaptors’ projection of their ideas onto the foreign in spite of themselves. Misunderstanding is therefore almost inevitable on some occasions, for as argued by Gershon Shaked (1989, p. 8), ‘it implied cultural transmission from someone else’s realm to our own.’ However he (ibid., p. 14) also emphasises that ‘[c]ultural awareness ... implies a dialogue in which one acknowledges what is different and struggles over what is familiar’ so that one can ‘compare his world with others, enriching it with a constant process of analogy and metaphorization between himself and his fellow man outside himself.’ Given the importance of dialogic encounter with the foreign, the adaptor’s knowledge of foreign strands is required during the weaving process; otherwise unreflective understanding and incorrect handling of materials might occur to mar the quality of the product. To evaluate the quality, or examine whether an adaptation is effective and contributive, there must be a criterion: authenticity as an instinctive response in itself is problematic. As Hutcheon (2006, p. xiii) contends, ‘there are many and varied motives behind adaptation and few involve faithfulness,’ not least that authenticity is a myth. The criterion is a reflective interweaving of different cultural strands based on recognition rather than negligence of each strand’s connotations and complexities, with a consistent inner logic. Catherine Diamond (1999, p. 145) puts forth an ideal result: ‘an interpretation of the text that allows for a true confrontation with difference, an act primarily intellectual, while at the same time creating bonds of familiarity which may stimulate emotional empathy.’ Such a dialogic and unified intercultural encounter can eventuate with necessary reflection and consistency during interweaving.

To further investigate the adaptor’s role, this chapter is going to approach the RSC’s endeavour in light of its strategies to deal with the source play’s socio-cultural and aesthetic elements. The methodology is performance and textual analysis based on a comparative approach. Setting against previous intercultural encounters between Asia and Euro-America, it tries to answer the following questions: How was socio-cultural difference, a barrier to effective acculturation negotiated? How did the RSC deal with aesthetics of Chinese opera and Western theatre? Did any new aesthetic paradigm emerge for either the RSC or Chinese opera? Firstly this chapter will address the subtle shift of socio-cultural values in the RSC’s adaptation to see how it managed, although unwittingly, to Westernise a Chinese story and its outcome. This chapter will then study the aesthetic blending of Chinese opera and Shakespeare evidenced in dramaturgy, which revealed the result of insufficient study of the source culture in intercultural adaptation.

• [1] For cases of misreading regarding Brecht, Barba and others, see the first part of Tian (2008),Kato (2010), Winet (1998). For cases of postmodern playfulness, see Lei (2011).
• [2] See for instance, Diamond (1994), Schlenker (1999).
• [3] The synopsis of this play is: In the 6th century BCE, there was a state called Jin (?-601 BCE) inChina. Two powerful ministers, Tu’an Gu and Zhao Dun were politically antagonistic. Toseize more power, Tu’an persuaded the stupid King into slaughtering the entire house of theZhao, but a baby boy, namely, the Orphan of Zhao born to his princess mother, wassmuggled out by a country doctor called Cheng Ying. Hearing this, Tu’an commanded thatall new-born boys in the state be killed if the Orphan was not found. In order to save theOrphan and other innocent babies, Cheng found the retired minister Gongsun Chujiu, andthey decided that Cheng passed his son off as the Orphan, and then reported to Tu’an thatGongsun sheltered the Orphan. Having believed that the Zhao’s clan was exterminated, thechildless Tu’an took Cheng’s son, who in fact was the Orphan, as his adopted son. Whenthe Orphan came of age, Cheng told him the truth. By killing Tu’an, the Orphan avengedhis house’s extermination. Although playwright James Fenton did not mention the specificsources of his adaptation, one can infer some of them from the passages he quoted: YuShuyan’s and Ma Lianliang’s Beijing opera versions, Ji Junxiang’s zaju version and XuYuan’s chuanqi version, of which Ji Junxiang’s was at the centre.
• [4] 11 This play was the first Chinese play ever introduced to Europe. For details and critiques ofprevious adaptations, see particularly Fan (1984), Tian (2008, pp. 19-26).
• [5] For a critique of this production, see Tian (2008, pp. 124-136).
• [6] Fischer-Lichte (2014, pp. 5-10) intends to replace ‘intercultural theatre’ with this new term onaccount of several underlying problems in intercultural theatre. Yet her ideas are notentirely convincing, for intercultural theatre has been constantly changing its connotationagainst new paradigms. Her term as a model to describe details of intercultural theatre isnevertheless useful. In this chapter, therefore, this term is applied as a tool for description.