Contemporary Legend Theater (當代傳奇劇場) is famed for having created some of the most intriguing and imaginative adaptations of works taken from the Western literary canon. Twenty-two years ago it caused a sensation in Chinese operatic circles with The Kingdom of Desire (慾望城國), a bold, and some would say sacrilegious, repackaging of Beijing opera to tell the story of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. With the group’s newest production, Run, Chekov, a musical that weaves 14 of the writer’s short stories into a single narrative, founder and artistic director Wu Hsing-kuo (吳興國) is preparing to shake things up once again.
Challenging the established order is, Wu says, a matter of necessity if Contemporary Legend is to survive as a permanent company, one able to foster its own talent and provide a stage for operatic artists to practice their skills and develop in an environment with limited opportunities for younger performers of traditional opera.
During an interview with the Taipei Times, Wu sat on a low, white plastic stool in the cavernous space of the East Second Hall (東二館) of Huashan 1914 Creative Park (華山1914). Wearing a massive black cape and pallid makeup, he resembled a dressed-down Phantom of the Opera. And the similarities with Andrew Lloyd Webber do not end there — Run, Chekov resembles a modern musical far more than it does even the most adventurous Chinese opera-oriented compositions in Contemporary Legend’s repertoire.
Photo courtesy of Contemporary Legend Theater
Wu insists that he has not abandoned the core traditions of his artistic development, and reiterated his profound faith in the skills and training that have made him the versatile performer that he is today. Contemporary Legend continues to put on highly traditional performances that highlight the great achievements of Beijing opera, such as last year’s The Legendary Pear Garden (梨園傳奇), but Wu believes that such productions, steeped as they are in tradition, are insufficient. He says that the first phase of his artistic revolution, embodied in productions like The Kingdom of Desire, is also not enough.
“Productions like these play to the festival circuit,” producer Lin Hsiu-wei (林秀偉) said, while traditional performances attract a niche audience of aficionados, old folk and tourists searching for the exotic. With Run, Chekov, Contemporary Legend aims to directly tap into contemporary issues and styles, in search of the elusive holy grail of a contemporary Chinese musical.
The conception of Run, Chekov is bold, and also topical in that it falls on the 150th anniversary of the great Russian author’s birth. Wu said he had the idea of reworking some of Chekov’s stories into his own work almost a decade ago, and Lin underlined the many points that made Chekov such an appealing author for such a project.
“Many of Taiwan’s older generation of authors read the Russians, and where influenced by their attachment and understanding of the importance of the land to the human spirit,” Lin said. “Authors like Chekov had a great resonance with Taiwanese authors writing about rural environments under threat from economic forces that made some rich, while pushing others beyond the limits of poverty. They had a great understanding of the emotional forces that came into play.”
She also suggested that modern Russian writers, situated between a Western and Asian mentality, wrote stories that are immediately accessible to Taiwanese audiences, which are influenced by traditional Chinese and Western liberal values.
Chekov had a very clear eye for mendacity, manifested in all of society’s strata, and Run, Chekov amalgamates 14 short stories into a single multi-strand narrative that explores the lives of characters from the top to the bottom of the social ladder. The daunting task of the adaptation was given to Chang Da-chun (張大春), once the enfant terrible of Chinese letters and one of the most sophisticated adaptors of classical literature, both Chinese and Western, into a contemporary context. Chang wrote the script for Contemporary Legend’s highly entertaining 108 Heroes: Tales From “The Water Margins” (水滸108), and the clever interweaving of stories in Run, Chekov is certainly in tune with the mix-and-match capabilities of his well-stocked mind.
While making use of Western source material is not unusual for Contemporary Legend, Run, Chekov has departed further than ever from the centrality of Beijing opera’s musical and stylistic conventions. The music, composed by Lu Liang-hui (廬亮輝), spans Russian romantic classical and Taiwan folk genres, with a strong vein of cross-cultural contemporary classical. Movements taken from the operatic training of the performers are used throughout the work, hinting at the classical context from which Contemporary Legend has emerged.
Beijing opera actress Chien Yu-shan (錢宇珊) said that Wu had put the production’s cast members under enormous pressure to critically engage with their roles. This kind of creativity is very different from what is usual in operatic training.
“Turning out well is not about doing a couple of somersaults and a presentation pose according to the book. You need to think about character,” she said, an interpretive function that is not much required in strictly traditional performance.
“Working with us is just endless pressure,” Wu said. “But we produce people with traditional skills who might be able to work in a variety of environments.” Run, Chekov is a chance for young actresses such as Chien to find new means of expression, even as they continue to hone their skills within Beijing opera.
Contemporary Legend has been criticized for playing fast and loose with tradition, but its willingness to adapt has enabled it to survive in a harsh environment for more than two decades.
Though this production’s popular style may jar with the self-conscious artistry of past productions, and might even cause some audience members to dismiss Run, Chekov as nothing more than a bit of silliness by an otherwise respectable company, the musical still has high artistic and moral aspirations.
Chekhovian sensibility is seriously explored, and parallels are drawn between his empathetic view of the unfairness of Russian society and contemporary Taiwan.
Run, Chekov blurs the boundaries between highbrow and lowbrow art. In the words of producer Lin, the production has changed gear from creating theater that fuses technical and conceptual elements, to something that transcends these differences in an organic whole. As with any such groundbreaking work, there is much that is jarring, but the long run at Huashan 1914 Creative Park should be invaluable in allowing Contemporary Legend to hone this new type of production into something that will lead the way in developing a uniquely Taiwanese style of musical theater.
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