Back to the future: 1979-1989
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China: Twelfth Night — Eleventh Hour

Memories of performing Shakespeare in China in the 1980s.

Essay

Although my wife Emily Richard and I had toured Britain with Shakespeare's 'Twelfth Night' for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1978, in 1982 we both jumped at the chance to see Manila, Singapore, Malaysia, China and Japan.

We were offered to play Viola and Feste in a decidedly modest, not to say cut-price, British Council production of the play, a three-month tour with the London Shakespeare Group. China was the prize of course. It was the early days of the Chinese Open Door Policy. They were letting in bigger fish than us, the Royal Ballet with its 'Romeo and Juliet' and America's Arthur Miller with 'Death of a Salesman' for the People's Art Theatre in Beijing. David Hockney and the poet Stephen Spender were to meet other painters and poets, resulting in them publishing an illustrated 'China Diary' for Western consumption.

The English language newspaper 'China Daily' reviewed our first performance in Beijing, 17 October 1982: 'It seems particularly appropriate to have brought "Twelfth Night" to Beijing, where its classic tomfoolery and occasional singing seems to have much in common with another classic form, that of Peking Opera.' It had so happened that during the Cultural Revolution, which had only ceased with Mao's death in 1976, classic opera had been supressed as 'feudal and bourgeois' by Mao's wife, Jiang Qing. It was replaced by eight approved operas glorifying Mao's thought featuring soldiers, peasants and workers as the heroes. On our tour of China we saw several examples of classic opera. It was as if the turbulence of the Cultural Revolution had never happened: Jiang Qing and the Gang of Four were in prison and the historic tales of feudal episodes held sway again.

'Scene follows scene' wrote the 'China Daily' critic of our production, 'without curtain or pause, much as in Shakespeare's day'. The Cultural Revolution was Mao's idea, just another of the Great Helmsman's storms and wrecks, but he was dominating the scene — his picture over the Gate of Heavenly Peace leading to the Forbidden City. One couldn't help noticing that his Mao jacket was of a distinctly superior material to the ubiquitous uniform version seen absolutely everywhere in the streets — it is still a surprise to see the headline in my yellowing copy of 'China Daily': 'Variety in Textiles — In the last five years the gross value of textile production has doubled and there is a greater variety of fabrics on the market. People are better dressed.'

Perhaps a more realistic picture of the state of things might be divined about the position of the intelligentsia, so persecuted during the Cultural Revolution: 'The local leadership should trust intellectuals, and admit them into the party under the same conditions as workers and peasants', quoted from 'China Daily'. Had the British Council thought to print Peter Hall's 1966 Folio Society introduction to 'Twelfth Night' in the program for our Chinese audiences they would soon have thought better of it:

'All Shakespeare's thinking, whether religious, political or moral, is based on his concept of order [ … ] Revolution, whether in the family, the State or the heavens breathes disorder and ultimate anarchy.'

They would have been safe to quote a snippet — 'balance is the only sure basis of life'.

Even at this distance I hope it is not too much to hope that something of the 'real life' of the play's artifice transcended the barriers of thousands of miles and language for the 15,000 people who saw us perform out of China's population of over 900 million.

Harold Pinter's 'Betrayal'

I have also been thinking about Harold Pinter's 1978 play 'Betrayal': its American premier squeezes neatly into 1980 in New York on Broadway, and firmly into cinemas as a movie in 1983. Whilst he was ill Harold Pinter's Nobel Lecture was videoed in London and seen throughout the world. After a damning indictment of what he portrayed as America's aggressive, mendacious foreign policies since the end of the First World War and our complicity in them, he concluded with an exhortation for us to recognise an 'obligation that devolves upon us all to define the real truth of our lives and our society.'

Did we feel challenged, chastened when we heard that? Yes. But truth and falsehood, he asserted, are different depending upon whether one is thinking as a playwright or as a citizen. For the playwright truth can be illusive, ambiguous, and even untrue and true at the same time. Not so for the citizen — hence the 'mandatory' obligation for us to 'define the real truth of our lives and our society.'

In Pinter's deadly serious opening to his speech there is perhaps a straight-faced playfulness as he talks about the creation of his plays and gives examples — a word or image can come 'out of the blue' with no further intimation or information attached. As for the characters that emerge, he calls them 'A' and 'B' to begin with, without necessarily being aware yet of their relationships to one another; he says 'you certainly can't dictate to them'.

However, his play 'Betrayal' didn't come out of the blue; in fact, as is now widely known — at Pinter's behest — from Michael Billington's biography, the clandestine affair of the play was his own real life affair with Joan Bakewell. She told 'The Telegraph' in 2011 that the play portrayed many of the events of the affair 'with an accuracy verging on the literal'. It seems as if his characters might have been under a mysterious mandatory obligation.

Real dramas of the 1980s

In 1981 another actor, Ronald Reagan — this time turned not playwright but politician and President of the United States — said: 'I do have to point out that everything that has been said and everything in their manuals indicates that, unlike us, the Soviet Union believes that a nuclear war is possible. And they believe it's winnable.' I must confess that the quotation is taken from an unfriendly book entitled 'Reagan's Reign of Error' and so naturally carries a contradiction: 'The U S Army must be prepared to fight and win when nuclear weapons are used'.

In Britain, the Government in 1980 issued, by public demand, what had been limited copies of the pamphlet 'Protect and Survive'. I don't recall seeing one or being tempted to find out how to turn a tiny cellar into a nuclear bunker: rather I hoped, if it came to it, that I might be at the epicentre and finished off before realising any of the horror.

Having touched on what we call 'real life' I might quote Arthur Miller. His 1984 diary 'Salesman in Beijing' is revelatory about his play and China. His and the company's triumphant quest was not without difficulties. He wrote: 'If this is in the nature of a small revolution for them, I am even less certain of what the audience is going to make of them … If layers of make-up are permitted to turn the actors into symbols, rather than fully dimensional, realistic people, they will be defeating their own attempts to act with, rather than against reality. The poetry of this play arises, not out of such appearances but out of the expansion of the real into many dimensions of dream, memory … but without the real it won't work'.

Perhaps everyone was after reality in many dimensions. As far as the British Council was concerned culture, 'soft power', often had a hard core. The Council's head of drama and dance, Robert Sykes, might have wanted to impress Mrs Thatcher, never a fan of taxpayers' money being spent on the arts. He was quoted by Leslie Geddes Brown in 'The Sunday Times' on 3 July 1983 as saying: 'If a Council rep talks to a minister in a concert interval, next morning's business of buying a Harrier Jump Jet is made easier'. Nor apparently was the Council above cultural compromise, 'A film about the lives of budgies made by ten-year olds from Nottingham had to be censored before going to Cairo. Ten seconds of explicit sex, by budgies, had to be cut.'

In Shanghai and Beijing

On our first day in China we were taken by coach from Shanghai's little airport, its arrival lounge simply decorated with one or two large classic landscape reproductions. Our set and costumes travelled with us along the main road leading to the centre. There were many horse-drawn carts piled high with green vegetables.

Before we reached the centre we turned off through some stout gates into an orange grove. We were told by our interpreters that this was where we were to stay for the night and indeed there were oranges hanging outside our bedroom window. At some point we were shown, somewhat gleefully, a bathroom which we were told had been Chairman Mao's, for the whole place had been his local headquarters, a simple well-appointed airy place. Next morning we were taken for a glimpse of the theatre in Shanghai. I took my Olympus SLR out of my camera bag and began to fix a lens to photograph the exterior; suddenly I became aware of being surrounded by a little crowd of quietly attentive Mao-jacketed young men, the camera being their main focus. One of them spoke to me tentatively: 'Hello'.

'Hello' I replied. Emboldened by the success of his overture he explained to me with delight that 'Hello' was the name of the BBC English language TV program he was studying and our encounter was his first chance to speak English to a live Englishman. I sometimes wonder what he is doing now and hope he remembers the moment as I do.

As official guests in Beijing we were taken to the famed historic marvels, the Great Wall. One day one the actors asked, as we were being taken by coach on a trip, where the Democracy Wall was. I can hear the chatter in the coach fall silent now as we realised a line had been crossed.

We went to the Forbidden City, a walled other world, where little knots of westerners in their brightly coloured leisure clothes were vastly outnumbered by Mao-jacketed Chinese. Even so there were enormous stretches of space, but for perhaps a little one-child family in the distance taking their ease, or a solitary couple sedately walking holding hands. The gorgeous ornate buildings with their yellow tiled roofs and their archetypal up-turned corners surmounted by gilded magic creatures were in perfect condition. Only one pair of high deep-red walls forming a very long desolate walkway — the equivalent of the servants' backstairs perhaps — was showing signs of damp and peeling plaster, but near its beginning it had a large portentous door with freshly painted panels. We must have seen a tiny proportion of the city.

Nowadays I gather one can spend a whole day seeing many rooms expertly restored by international teams, crammed with treasures at last brought out of the safety of far-flung secret places. Back in 1982 it was astonishing that this 600-year-old miracle survived the 'out with the old' Cultural Revolution and only a few years later looked so lovingly cared for.

At the Drama School we visited students demonstrating their naturalistic paces in what might have been originally a Soviet-inspired Stanislavsky approach — at any rate, a training not so distant from our own with voice exercises, improvised scenes or 'études'. I heard on BBC Radio 4 recently that the Cultural Revolution is airbrushed out of mind these days in China, but it was one of the études that morning that made an overt reference to it: two students playing old men who were entranced in admiration of a flowering pot-plant. Our interpreters, whispering quickly, explained that pot-plants had been banned as bourgeois during the Cultural Revolution. The short, charming episode must have had wide and deep resonance for the mature teaching staff and our middle-aged interpreters, women who'd been taught very good English at missionary schools in pre-revolutionary China and for some reason didn't wear the Mao jacket, and so one felt as if in the care of aunts.

'They have a long, long road to go, the destruction of what they had had was complete,' said an American acquaintance of Arthur Miller who'd become the American director of the International Advisory Panel Chinese University Project, dropping by at Miller's hotel lunch table one day. He told him of the 200-million-dollar World Bank grant 'to begin the reconstruction of a higher educational system for the country'. Even the drama students we watched might have had childhood memories of Mao's Red Guards, the violent humiliating tactics used in the treatment of intellectuals and the suppression of 'the four olds — old customs, old culture, old habits, old ideas'.

As it happened, our Olivia in 'Twelfth Night' (Susan Farmer) our Orsino, (Garry Raymond) and our Sir Toby (Edward Hardwicke) had a performance of Pinter's 'Betrayal' up their sleeves. They gave it at the British Embassy in Beijing with the use of a table and two chairs. Clearly the old custom of bourgeois adultery was back in cultural favour, because the Chinese guests who were there were so delighted to see Pinter acted they insisted that 'Betrayal' must be put on as an extra performance at the theatre when we got to Nanjing.

Calm in the cities

What we knew of the Cultural Revolution's violent social turbulence, which had only ended in 1976, might never have happened. In the cities we observed a calm. The population seeming to have scant representation in the vast space of Tiananmen Square, empty of people in the huge area in front of the Great Hall of the People. In fact we noted on the flag-decked day that Gaddafi was due in Beijing that the road passing the Forbidden City and our hotel had its usual traffic of bicycles, but now interspersed with tricycles towing trailers bearing two or three baths. There was an alfresco barber's shop on the pavement and a boy selling hot roast potatoes. Round the corner from our hotel and the Forbidden City there was a tiny courtyard, a solitary stand pipe in its centre, surrounded by diminutive single story houses — this a short stroll from an unremarked long line of soldiers from where we could stand in sight of the great square. It was a line that stretched so far towards the Great Hall of the People that it became a tiny faint line of perspective impossible to discern as being made up of humanity.

We had to beg for time to rest before giving our evening performances, but it was worth it to get up early one morning to visit a park and glimpse in the early light Tai Chi being practised by lone men of all ages, each in his own clearing. There was a special place where old men met with their caged birds which they would let out on a tether.

One free evening we were taken to see a Beijing Opera performance — certainly with layers of make-up and, to us, many exotic dimensions of theatrical reality. In the interval, being the only westerners there, we were surrounded by a crowd. Our minders explained we were the London Shakespeare Group. Like the wind through reeds the hushed word 'Shakespeare' was passed between them, becoming one of the memorable sounds of the tour.

We had no idea of the proportion of our audiences who spoke English — English lessons had been forbidden during the Cultural Revolution. Was our impact mainly kinetic? There were vertical strips of translation projected on either side of the proscenium in the theatre.

It was in Shanghai that we were told that the populous could not all be given the same day off from work, as things were, the wide pavements were absolutely crammed with people strolling apparently nowhere in particular ignoring the few shop windows displaying consumer goods. I have quite forgotten why and where we were strolling to but I have two photographs I took of the crowds sitting up on the barrier protecting stragglers from straying into the road. Not one person appears to take notice of the camera.

But now I remember one person who did. I was standing on a pavement in the middle of a bridge and she was down at one end — a mature, trousered wiry woman wearing a big conical straw hat and in charge of a large two-wheeled rubbish cart that she was about to pull up and over the bridge. It was as if she had taken a decision to foil me and my camera, for she started to run up the humpback of the bridge, gathering enough speed for me to fail to sort my focus and exposure before she passed me, over the bridge and gone. I have not so much as a blur to show for the experience, though I can see her tenacity to this day.

But I do have the hand-written copy of an English poem written and then read to us at the party at the British Embassy by a smiling guest in Mao jacket of superior grey, rather than blue, cloth:

How polite how tranquil audience is
Neither cough nor walking theatre it has
On stage the British are performing
Shakespeare's spirits are expressing

Great temptation the arts
Echoed in so many hearts
Restless imagination it arouses
The perfection of art it reaches

Say no, the gap of language
Say no, the gap of thousand miles
Wonderful show made us to feel,
The British and the Chinese are so close.

Remembering Tiananmen Square today

Today's date is 4 June 2019 and the number 46 is being automatically obliterated from the Internet in China, as is the emoji of a lit candle, so that no one can thus memorialise or mourn a loved one killed when the army with tanks and guns carried out their orders to clear Tiananmen Square and the surrounding area of the million people who had been protesting peacefully, some on hunger strike, against corruption and for democratic rights for five days, 30 years ago today.

Here is how Stephen Spender mused on Tiananmen Square in his and Hockney's book in 1982:
'… the image in my mind, of the masses ceases simply to be that of the million or so who fill Tiananmen Square on May Day and for official parades. It becomes much more like an embodied will of the people, choosing in times of division between leaders and policies. In China, on occasion, the masses represent — in practical terms — a force that has a momentum of its own which creates the future.'

Failing 'an embodied will of the people', the mere million students and their sympathisers in Tiananmen Square and beyond can be seen today in documentary footage talking to the trucks of soldiers, arguing, offering them water and food. The soldiers' expressionless faces and averted eyes eventually change and there are friendly smiles and handshakes caught by the camera. There is even a point when the trucks of soldiers withdraw.

As we know that is not how this particular mass of the people could be allowed to 'create the future'.

See also:

Further reading

  • 'Betrayal' by Harold Pinter (London: Eyre Methuen, 1978) [National Library of Scotland shelfmark: N1.79.5].
  • 'China Diary' by Stephen Spender and David Hockney (London: Thames and Hudson, 1982) [Shelfmark: HP3.93.385].
  • 'China Reconstructs' (Peking: China Welfare Institute, 1952-1989) [Shelfmark: HJ8.47 (Volume 26 (1977) — Volume 38 (1989)) PER].
  • 'Reagan's Reign of Error' by Mark Green and Gail MacColl (USA: Random House USA Inc, 1988).
  • 'Harold Pinter' by Michael Billington (London: Faber and Faber, 2007) [Shelfmark: PB5.207.349/2].
  • 'Salesman in Beijing' by Arthur Miller (London: Methuen, 1984) [Shelfmark: H2.84.1161].
  • 'The Sunday Times' 3 July 1983 (London: Allied Newspapers) [Shelfmark: CB.2/148(1-)].

 

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