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.
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