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[THE WEEKENDER] ‘The Scholar and the Executioner’

Shanghai Dramatic Arts Center showed local companies how theater should be done with its production of The Scholar and the Executioner. PHOTO COURTESY OF TAIPEI ARTS INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION

When the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Center (上海話劇藝術中心) visited in January, it was part of the hugely disappointing The Last Night of Taipan Chin (金大班的最後一夜), which was clearly little more than a star vehicle for actress and celebrity Liu Xiaoqing (劉曉慶). With the presentation of the multi-award-winning play The Scholar and the Executioner (秀才與劊子手) by the highly respected contemporary playwright and theorist Huang Wei-ruo (黃維若), the company proved it’s capable of much more.

The range of theatrical theories and styles that Huang sought to combine in The Scholar is daunting in its ambition and remarkable in its success. Puppet theater, and the theoretical issues that underpin the use of puppets — or in this case masks — is raised in the very first moments of the play. The idea that these were “meat puppets” — the US punk/grunge band scene came to mind, one of many contemporary references that the play throws up — set one of the play’s themes; then there was the Brechtian declamatory diction and elements taken from the Theater of the Absurd. Added to that were the formal poses and use of language taken both from Beijing opera and from the tradition of Chinese vernacular storytelling. Some of this was given straight, some ironically, and at other times refracted through the lens of Chinese Communist Model Plays.


While the presentation of the play draws heavily on Chinese traditional culture, the theoretical underpinnings are very contemporary, and one can conceive of the whole as an ironic take on ideologically-driven drama of the Left, with nods to people as diverse as George Bernard Shaw and Pirandello. On top of that, the masked cast serves also as a kind of Greek chorus, commenting on the action and moving the story along.


What makes the whole thing even more remarkable, is that despite this heavy academic baggage, the story of the scholar and the executioner, both finding themselves unemployed after an edict abolishing the more elaborate forms of torture and the other uniquely Chinese torture of the civil service examinations, is really fun and interesting. There is plenty of humor, both verbal and physical, and in the way that Huang wears his considerable learning lightly, he bears some similarities to a playwright like Tom Stoppard, who has also done well with his ability to create theater that appeals both at an intellectual and a visceral level. This is all stuff from which Taiwan’s theater community could learn, for scripts have always been the traditional weakness of Taiwan’s drama, and this is a wonderful example of what can be achieved in the ubiquitous concept of fusion. It certainly sets the bar very high, but Taiwan has proved that it can make the grade if the commitment is there.


There are a number of minor complaints about the performance. It was unfortunate that subtitles were displayed only for the more difficult sections of text, such as when the scholar character recites verses from the Confucian Analects, as the text is so dense and the delivery so rapid that sometimes written text may have been of some assistance even to local Chinese-speaking members of the audience. That the English subtitles were only provided for these sections made them virtually useless, quite apart from the fact that even these subtitles were often utterly cryptic, and could not have assisted a non-Chinese speaker to understand the play.


Sound quality yet again was a major issue, something which this reviewer has commented on more than once. With actors speaking lines behind masks, sound quality on the microphones was often distorted. This made the task of following the play that much more difficult, and is clearly an issue that the technicians of the National Theater ought to be able to overcome.
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