Fri, Nov 14, 2003 page17

• The 'People's Artist' and his life's work

  Lao She spent most of his professional life writing a story about Beijing in 1899 when the Qing dynasty was beginning to collapse. The award-winning stage version of his tale is being staged in Taipei

  • By David Momphard / STAFF REPORTER
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  A dramatic work will occasionally gain importance for its place in history and occasionally for its exceptional literary value. Beneath the Red Banner (正紅旗下) is that rare dramatic gem that is endowed with both. That it stars one of China's official "top-tier" actors, Jiao Huang (焦晃), and is brought by the internationally renowned Shanghai Drama Arts Center (上海話劇藝術中心) certainly indicates the quality of the production, but more important is the subject matter of the autobiographical work.

  Jiao plays Lao She (老舍), Red Banner's author, who weaves together stories of Beijing citizens witnessing the fall of the Qing dynasty.

  "Lao She's story is more than just a story, it's an epic tale with great historical relevance," Jiao said while meeting reporters last Friday. "As someone who lived through the Cultural Revolution, I feel quite close to the suffering portrayed in the story."

  To say that 1899, when the story is set and when Lao She was born, was a time of great upheaval for China is an understatement. The Middle Kingdom was decades behind a world that had recently and rapidly modernized. The Japanese had routed the Chinese military just four years earlier and foreigners in the Chinese countryside, both Japanese and Western, were growing in numbers and helping themselves to the nation's resources. An organization of outraged Chinese, the Fists of Righteous Harmony (義和拳), were intent on ousting all foreigners from China. To the foreigners they opposed, they were known as Boxers by virtue of their martial arts skills, which they believed made them impervious to foreign bullets. The Boxers also had a turbulent relationship with the imperial court, who first opposed, then supported their cause.

  To the characters of Lao She's novel, all this was a source of particular consternation. Like the Qing rulers, they were themselves Manchurians, albeit of a low societal level, and had an undying faith in the divinity of the emperor and the power of his court.

  But the Qing court was itself in a state of upheaval. In his late twenties, the Emperor Guangxu tried to assert power and instigate liberal reform in the kingdom. His efforts were opposed by the empress dowager Cixi, who had adopted Guangxu as an infant and seen to it that he was made emperor at the tender age of three.

  A powerful woman who ruled China literally from behind a curtain, she served as regent while the young emperor came of age. When her power became threatened by Guangxu's reforms, she had him immured in a palace outside Beijing and resumed control of government.

  She cunningly co-opted the Boxers' hate for foreigners and supported their efforts to kill missionaries and rid the kingdom of outside influence. In 1900, the Boxer Rebellion would be quashed by an international military force -- 2,500 men from eight countries who had come both to rescue their missionaries and establish a permanent foothold for merchants. Cixi would flee the palace disguised as a peasant shortly before Westerners would enter the Forbidden City for the first time without an invitation.

  The pain of military defeat, the strain of revolution and palace intrigue line the margins of Lao She's novel, but its pages are dedicated not to history's characters, but ordinary citizens of Beijing who bore witness to the upheaval.

  This was Lao She's greatest strength as a writer. He left China and his job as the principal of an elementary school in 1924 to lecture at the School of Oriental and African Studies at London University. While there, he polished his English by reading the works of contemporary masters like Mark Twain, whose wit and ability to fully develop characters he would later put to use in his own novels. He was expert at depicting detail and in using the color of the Beijing dialect to develop his characters.

  Red Banner's gentle and honest father, the thrifty and diligent mother, the sarcastic and conceited aunt, the foppish brother-in-law, the overbearing mother-in-law and her good-natured husband all show a kind of humanity, humor and hubris that was uncommon in Chinese storytelling before Lao She. It was a trait that, in 1951, earned him the title "People's Artist" by the Beijing Municipality.

  Despite the fact that its events take place in the year of the author's birth, Red Banner is autobiographical and Lao She spent most of his professional life writing it, but died in 1966 before it was finished.

  Like his characters who witnessed the tottering of the Qing dynasty, Lao She himself felt the changes of modern China. He suffered physical and psychological

  persecution at the hands of the Red Guards and is widely believed to have taken his own life as a result. It's in this context that Red Banner takes on even greater historical weight.

  Jiao brings the master storyteller to life. Something of a master storyteller himself, Jiao became famous in China and Taiwan for his turn as the emperor Kangxi in the TV movie The Yongzheng Dynasty (雍正王朝).

  "Throughout the production of this play, my sole aim has been to maintain the presence of Lao She in the story," Jiao said. "Representing him faithfully is paramount if you understand the importance of history."

  The play was adapted for the stage from Lao She's novel by Lee Lungyun (李龍雲) and the Shanghai Drama Arts Center in 1998. The company chose to revive the production with Jiao in the lead role when it opened its new facility in 2001. In September of that year, the show won the Cao Yu Chinese Dramatic Literature Award (中國曹禺戲劇獎).

  Beneath the Red Banner opened last night and will play again tonight and tomorrow night at 7:30 and Sunday, Nov. 16 at

  2:30pm at the National Theater (國家戲劇院). Call 2343 1647.
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