Following hard on the heels of the Beijing opera version of The Wilderness (原野) by Taipei Li-Yuan Peking Opera Theater (台北新劇團) at Novel Hall (新舞臺) earlier this month, another version of the same work is being staged at the same venue, this time as a dramatic production by Tianjin Renmin Yishu Juyuan (天津人民藝術劇院).
The Wilderness is widely regarded as Cao Yu’s (曹禺) most complex and controversial work. Written in the late 1930s, no definitive version of the play was produced, the final stages of writing interrupted by Japan’s invasion of China in 1937. This has allowed directors considerable leeway to find their own interpretations, and the play has been adapted many times in many different mediums.
The adaptation by the Tianjin Renmin Yishu Juyuan, which premiered in 2006, has toured China with great success. Cao, as “China’s greatest modern playwright,” is sometimes acclaimed as Asia’s Shakespeare, and his works are given the same kind of canonical adulation. While the Tianjin production claims to be utterly faithful to the spirit of the original, the producers have taken a hatchet to the original play, cutting the text down from 80,000 words to just 30,000 and incorporating modern elements such as huge puppets that serve as a Greek chorus to the action, as well as occasionally doubling as elements within the set. A cellist performs sections from Mozart’s Requiem throughout.
In The Wilderness, Cao was moving away from the social realism that had dominated his earlier works such as Thunderstorm (雷雨) and Sunrise (日出), and he had begun to dabble in expressionism and symbolism. While this departure was not popular with audiences in early productions of the work, the dilution of the rather tub-thumping socialist polemic with a deeper exploration of human nature makes The Wilderness probably Cao’s most accessible work for modern audiences.
The Novel Hall does not often host foreign dramatic productions, but according to Vivien Ku (辜懷群), executive director of the Koo Foundation (辜公亮文教基金會), which operates the venue, the opportunity of juxtaposing two very different productions of the same work was too good to resist.
Cao’s works, with their roots in China’s socialist revolution, and with his own elevation to the position of literary doyen of the Communist establishment, were once banned in Taiwan. Now it is more a question of whether they have any relevance. In the case of The Wilderness, with its vast potential for re-interpretation, there is clearly much a director can do to bring a piece of China’s literary history into the 21st century.
The Tianjin Renmin Yishu Juyuan has condensed the involved melodrama of the original into something with a clearer focus. They have boiled it down and brought out the expressionist elements that Cao was still struggling to find in the 1930s. Given that drama is somewhat under-represented in the growing wave of cross-strait cultural exchanges, this is a valuable opportunity to see a first-class drama group dealing with the baggage of history.
A few weeks ago I found myself at a Family Mart talking with the morning shift worker there, who has become my coffee guy. Both of us were in a funk over the “unseasonable” warm weather, a state of mind known as “solastalgia” — distress produced by environmental change. In fact, the weather was not that out of the ordinary in boiling Central Taiwan, and likely cooler than the temperatures we will experience in the near-future. According to the Taiwan Adaptation Platform, between 1957 and 2006, summer lengthened by 27.8 days, while winter shrunk by 29.7 days. Winter is not
Taiwan’s post-World War II architecture, “practical, cheap and temporary,” not to mention “rather forgettable.” This was a characterization recently given by Taiwan-based historian John Ross on his Formosa Files podcast. Yet the 1960s and 1970s were, in fact, the period of Taiwan’s foundational building boom, which, to a great extent, defined the look of Taiwan’s cities, determining the way denizens live today. During this period, functionalist concrete blocks and Chinese nostalgia gave way to new interpretations of modernism, large planned communities and high-rise skyscrapers. It is currently the subject of a new exhibition at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Modern
March 25 to March 31 A 56-year-old Wu Li Yu-ke (吳李玉哥) was straightening out her artist son’s piles of drawings when she inadvertently flipped one over, revealing the blank backside of the paper. Absent-mindedly, she picked up a pencil and recalled how she used to sketch embroidery designs for her clothing business. Without clients and budget or labor constraints to worry about, Wu Li drew freely whatever image came to her mind. With much more free time now that her son had found a job, she found herself missing her home village in China, where she
In recent years, Slovakia has been seen as a highly democratic and Western-oriented Central European country. This image was reinforced by the election of the country’s first female president in 2019, efforts to provide extensive assistance to Ukraine and the strengthening of relations with Taiwan, all of which strengthened Slovakia’s position within the European Union. However, the latest developments in the country suggest that the situation is changing rapidly. As such, the presidential elections to be held on March 23 will be an indicator of whether Slovakia remains in the Western sphere of influence or moves eastward, notably towards Russia and