Hugh Lee (李國修) says "they [actors] are the abstract and brief chroniclers of the time." Well, actually, Shakespeare got in there before him by about 400 years, but he is happy enough to give the bard full credit for both the pithy quote and the original story. "Shakespeare's plays have been used extensively for many kinds of productions ever since they were written. And Hamlet is one of the great stories about the theater." So he has felt few qualms in taking what he wants from Shakespeare's work and turning it to his own purposes.
One of the main structural devices used in the Fong-ping Trilogy (風屏劇團三部曲), of which Shamlet is the second play, is the play within a play. Shakespeare made ample use of this device - not least in Hamlet. Lee had already experimented extensively with this device in the first part of the trilogy, Collapse of The Great Wall (1989,半里長城), which told the story of a second rate theater group called the Fong-ping Troupe who are attempting to put on The Great Wall.
Lee wrote a full script for The Great Wall and then proceeded to deconstruct it, incorporating it into the larger play about the Fong-ping Troupe and its many interpersonal problems. Life and theater interact giving an added dimension to the idea that theater is "an abstract of the time."
Lee has continued to explore this device in a second play, Shamlet (莎姆雷特), which continued to use the Fong-ping Troupe as the protagonists, in what was eventually to become a trilogy of life in the theater. In this second play of the trilogy, the Fong-ping Troupe continues to battle against the odds to put on a successful production of one of the world's great classics. Naturally, they don't succeed. The pressures of their personal lives overwhelm them. The result is comedy. Expounding his grammar of the theater, Lee says, "Hamlet is a tragedy. Fong-ping is a tragedy. Tragedy plus tragedy equals comedy."
The nature of Shamlet1s comedy is situational. Lee, who worked in television before moving to the stage, says that most Chinese humor rarely goes beyond the verbal. "It vanishes in a second," he said. The situation in the Fong-ping Trilogy ranges from life in the theater to life in general, so that beneath the belly laughs, Lee never forgets that effective humor has its roots in human suffering. In the case of Apocalypse of Beijing Opera (also translated as Beijing Opera: The Revelation), the final part of the trilogy, Lee incorporated large parts of his own life story into the drama in a transcendent example of blurring the boundaries of life and theater.
In April this year, the company revived Apocalypse of Beijing Opera in the first step of a reverse performance of the trilogy. Now is the chance to revisit Shamlet, which was first performed in 1992 to great critical acclaim. This reverse revival of the trilogy is a further step in the interaction of life and theater, for Lee hopes that watching the play will cause people to look back to the time when the play was originally conceived and performed.
But in some respects it is no longer the same play. Lee says that considerable changes have been made to the script to draw an even closer parallel between the story of Hamlet and the story of the Fong-ping Troupe and to adapt it to skills and personalities of the new cast. The plays have grown with the director and with his audience, yet another aspect of Lee's insistence that theater is the abstract and brief chronicle of the time.
The Fong-ping Troupe itself was inspired by Noises Off by Michael Frayn. Lee said that originally he had the English play translated, but soon realized that its UK setting made it too remote from local audiences. Instead, he created something uniquely Taiwanese, something firmly rooted in local sensibilities. This forms the basis for Lee's forays into the universal and makes Shamlet a multi-layered work that contains much more than the glittering surface comedy.
Lee said he hoped that given the familiarity of audiences with the story of Hamlet, and the way the life of the Fong-ping Troupe mirrors aspects of the story, even western audiences would be able to enjoy the play despite the lack of subtitles. Lee said the group had experimented with the use of subtitles, but the costs had been prohibitive.
While the theater of Chinese language will necessarily resist internationalization, Lee said that he had no plans to alter the focus of his troupe. "The time is not ripe," he said. "We don't have the range of talent that places like the US can draw on." Although Ping-fong is renowned for the complex stage effects that allow Lee to juggle multiple scenes on stage, he intends to continue consolidating the troupe's tradition of cinematic realism.
As another Shakespearean immortal said: "Ripeness is all."
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