In the English-speaking world -- especially the world of theater -- most people know that Anton Chekhov wrote The Cherry Orchard. Canada's Theatre Smith-Gilmour first produced that play in 1998.
Sitting in a dull hallway in the National Theater (
"We felt a frustration that we wanted to accomplish something that we couldn't do with the actors we were working with," he said. "[They] had preconceived notions of how to play Chekhov .... No matter what we did, they went back to that."
And so, one year after tackling The Cherry Orchard, Theatre Smith-Gilmour began work on Chekhov's Shorts. The play will be performed as part of Taipei's biennial International Theater Festival. Tickets for the show, however, sold out before it opened.
Theatre Smith-Gilmour's take on Chekhov's fiction is a stark departure from orthodox interpretations of the Russian dramatist's work.
"I feel like we learn more about the theater from his fiction," Gilmour said. "In Chekhov, there's an essential and invisible story underneath the text."
In the play, a group of Russians travel On the Train to a place called Run-For-Your-Life. They pass the time by swapping stories, which are theatrical adaptations of Man in a Shell, Kashtanka, Sleepyhead, and Rothschild's Fiddle.
The entire production is performed by a cast of four which plays many roles, and aims to reveal "an intuitive response to the material" by escaping the context of 19th-century theater.
"What we set out to do was start with no decor and no props, and ... focus on the actors and what the actors could do," Gilmour said.
In fact, they didn't even start with a script. Over the course of a year, the four actors honed initial improvisations into an obsessively controlled choreography. There is dialogue, but there is also a reliance on the clown, mime, and melodramatic techniques of the School of Jacques Lecoq, where Gilmour and Smith met as students.
Many of the objects in the play -- playing cards, opera glasses, etc. -- exist only through mime. The main props are four suitcases, which are used extensively to represent chairs, walls, and an accordion. Everything else is created through the actors' movements.
Both Smith and Gilmour insist that this freedom from the text is what allows them access to the "tragicomic" stories "underneath the text."
"We ? find ways of telling the story, and it's not about reducing the story to a play," said Smith (when the two of them are together, Gilmour does most of the talking).
The bodily aspect of the play is both theatrically effective and visually intriguing. In the scene based on The Man in the Shell, Smith plays Belikov, a socially stunted and terminally self-conscious bureaucrat whose hands have the ability to retract expressively into the sleeves of his coat.
As Belikov shuffles slowly across the stage, the other three actors hold their suitcases vertically to create a wall behind him. The wall "follows" Smith as its component actors spin from the back to the front, taking time to recite a few lines of neighborhood gossip in between rotations.
As prosaic as that sounds, it's a kick to watch on stage -- which is the point.
May 6 to May 12 Those who follow the Chinese-language news may have noticed the usage of the term zhuge (豬哥, literally ‘pig brother,’ a male pig raised for breeding purposes) in reports concerning the ongoing #Metoo scandal in the entertainment industry. The term’s modern connotations can range from womanizer or lecher to sexual predator, but it once referred to an important rural trade. Until the 1970s, it was a common sight to see a breeder herding a single “zhuge” down a rustic path with a bamboo whip, often traveling large distances over rugged terrain to service local families. Not only
Ahead of incoming president William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20 there appear to be signs that he is signaling to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and that the Chinese side is also signaling to the Taiwan side. This raises a lot of questions, including what is the CCP up to, who are they signaling to, what are they signaling, how with the various actors in Taiwan respond and where this could ultimately go. In the last column, published on May 2, we examined the curious case of Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) heavyweight Tseng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦) — currently vice premier
The last time Mrs Hsieh came to Cihu Park in Taoyuan was almost 50 years ago, on a school trip to the grave of Taiwan’s recently deceased dictator. Busloads of children were brought in to pay their respects to Chiang Kai-shek (蔣中正), known as Generalissimo, who had died at 87, after decades ruling Taiwan under brutal martial law. “There were a lot of buses, and there was a long queue,” Hsieh recalled. “It was a school rule. We had to bow, and then we went home.” Chiang’s body is still there, under guard in a mausoleum at the end of a path
Last week the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) released a set of very strange numbers on Taiwan’s wealth distribution. Duly quoted in the Taipei Times, the report said that “The Gini coefficient for Taiwanese households… was 0.606 at the end of 2021, lower than Australia’s 0.611, the UK’s 0.620, Japan’s 0.678, France’s 0.676 and Germany’s 0.727, the agency said in a report.” The Gini coefficient is a measure of relative inequality, usually of wealth or income, though it can be used to evaluate other forms of inequality. However, for most nations it is a number from .25 to .50