Shakespeare on the Chinese Stage: Two Adaptations of Hamlet

 

 

(Presented at the Association for Theater in Higher Education Annual Conference, Toronto, Canada, July, 1999)

 

 

Shakespeare has been gaining popularity in the People's Republic of China and Taiwan during the last two decades. The reappearance of his plays on the Chinese stage after an absence of more than ten years during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) was directly linked to the political and economic developments in the post-Mao era. The open-door policy and economic reforms opened a flood gate for the introduction or re-introduction of Western culture into China. As the most prominent of the Western cultural icons, Shakespeare was naturally the center of attention as the Chinese people tried to reconnect themselves with the Western world. To welcome the Bard back would send a powerful signal of China's new cultural policy. So, in 1979 the Old Vic Company was invited to give performances of Hamlet in Shanghai and Beijing. Since then, the Chinese have mounted some fifty productions of Shakespeare's plays and there have been two Shakespeare festivals.^[i]

          In Taiwan, drama also went through an intensely politicized period somewhat similar  to the "Model Revolutionary Opera" movement in China during the Cultural Revolution. After the defeated Chinese Nationalist government retreated to Taiwan in 1949, the government used theater to spread its anti-Communist propaganda, creating a wave of "Oppose-Communist, Resist-Soviet" (fan gong kang e") drama in the 1950s and 60s.^[ii] Like the "revolutionary operas" on the Mainland, these anti-Communist plays were long on ideology but short on art. To breathe new life into Taiwan's stagnant stage, Taiwanese dramatists looked to the West for models and inspirations. Rapid economic growth in the 1970s and 80s transformed Taiwan into a modern and Westernized society with all the trappings of Western culture. In the field of performing arts, adaptations of Western plays have become an important component in the repertoire of many theatrical companies. To produce Shakespeare has the added bonus of bringing prestige to the company and even international attention to Taiwan. The Taiwanese production of Macbeth in the Peking opera style, for example, has toured England and France.^[iii] Other than the social and political reasons for which the Chinese have embraced Shakespeare in recent years, the most important reason is perhaps what one scholar calls Shakespeare's "malleability,"^[iv] which allows adapters to use his texts as a vehicle to express their own ideas. This paper will discuss two Chinese adaptations of Hamlet, one from China, one from Taiwan. Both productions were performed as huaju, (or spoken drama), the dramatic form introduced into China from the West in the early twentieth century.

          In the late autumn of 1990, an amateur theater organization called Drama Workshop put on four performances of Hamlet in the little theater of a school in Beijing. This modest production, taking place when the government-sponsored second Shakespeare Festival was canceled in the wake of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, stands out from the other  productions by its new interpretation of Hamlet's tragedy. Lin Zhaohua, director of this performance, based his production on the theme that everyone is Hamlet. He explains his concept in this way: "Hamlet is one of us. We probably run into him everyday in the streets. Those thoughts that torment him also torment us everyday; and the choices he faces we must also face everyday."^[v] He further points out that the Hamlet we see on the stage is not the Prince of Denmark, but ourselves, and "to be able to face ourselves is the most positive, brave, and heroic attitude that the modern man can have."^[vi]   

          To drive home the message that everyone is Hamlet, Lin creates a new image of Hamlet by having him switch roles with other characters throughout the play. For example, in Act I, Scene 2, Hamlet switches place with Claudius and former's denunciation of his mother's remarriage becomes the new king's criticism of his bride. Role change also makes us see Horatio in a new light. Instead of being Hamlet's loyal friend who brings him the news of having seen his father's ghost the night before, Horatio now becomes an informer to the new king. What happened in this scene makes Hamlet's later request for Horatio to keep the secret about the ghost's appearance appear ironic. In Lin Zhaohua's reformulated play, Hamlet is betrayed by his best friend. The Chinese audience could certainly identified with this betrayal with their own experiences of having been betrayed by their best friends and even family members during the many political campaigns since the founding of the People's Republic.
                     Hamlet also switches place with Polonius when he decides to use the actors to find out whether his uncle murdered his father. After Hamlet and the actors withdraw, the actor who plays Polonius immediately takes the role of Hamlet and reveals his plan to the audience. When Ophelia meets Hamlet in a room in the castle, she is confronted by three Hamlets: Hamlet himself, Claudius and Polonius transformed as Hamlet. Hamlet's famous "to be, or not to be" speech is delivered by all three. The noble prince, the evil king, the treacherous lord all share this existential anguish. In the final duel scene, when Hamlet strikes Claudius with the poisoned sword, it is Hamlet who falls down because another switch has taken place. This outcome renders Hamlet's revenge meaningless--we don't even know who killed whom.

          The act of revenge, which is central to the original play, is being trivialized in Lin Zhaohua's adaptation. According to Lin, Hamlet does not have the obligation to revenge his father's death because the father and son relationship is coincidental. Hamlet came into this world as a result of a moment of passion between his father and mother. His existence "is purely by chance." ^[vii] Lin further questions the justification of Hamlet's actions. To carry out his revenge, he caused the death of eight people, including his own. The guilty and the innocent both perished. Stripped of it moral justification, the act of revenge becomes a senseless slaughter. The frequent switching of roles among the characters in the play further suggests that there is no distinction between heroes and villains, between good and evil. Hamlet's lament "The time is out of joint; --O cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right" (Act I, Sc. 5) describes not only his own situation but the human condition in general.

         To call attention to the human condition, Lin Zhaohua uses the grave-digging scene as a unifying theme for the his production. The play begins amidst the clanking sound of grave diggers' spades and each act ends with the sound of their digging. The grave diggers also take the roles of other characters, creating the impression that they are digging their own graves while plotting against the others. At the end of the play when Fortinbras returns triumphant from Poland and is about to claim the throne, the sound of the grave diggers is again heard. Their dialogue serves as an ironic comment on the new dynasty that is about to begin. To use two clowns to bring home the message that "the houses a grave-maker makes last till doomsday" adds a comic touch to the philosophical contemplation on life and death.

          The stage setting of this production also reinforces the theme that everyone is Hamlet. The stage is given a neutral treatment with black and gray colors dominating. The actors also wear nondescript robes of these colored--no period costumes and blond wigs as it is the general rule for staging Western classics in China. Dirty and wrinkled backcloth serves as scenery and the stage is littered with old, useless machines. Five broken-down electric fans hang above the stage and turn intermittently. The King's and the Queen's thrones are old barber chairs. Just before Hamlet dies he points to this pile of old machines as his gifts for Fortinbras's new dynasty. The world Lin Zhaohua created in this play is not only out of joint, but also dominated by machines.      

          In contrast to the somber Hamlet produced in mainland China, the Taiwanese production turns Shakespeare's tragedy into a farce. To begin with, the title of the play is changed to Shamlet (Sha-mu-lei-te): the first character of the Chinese translation of Shakespeare's name "Sha" replaces the first character of Hamlet's "Ha." The playwright tells us that a printer's error was responsible for the name change and the mistake was not discovered until the final performance in the company's around-the-island tour. The Chinese audience may or may not be aware of the English pun on "sham," but Li Guoxiu, the adapter and director of this play, clearly wanted to use Shakespeare as a pretext for his drama about Taiwan. In his introduction to the performance entitled "Shakespeare is only a pretext," Li wrote "Comedy can produce an indelible impression and experience for the audience. One can employ comical techniques to make people think about serious things. This has always been my goal at Pingfeng."^[viii] Pingfeng is the name of Li's acting troupe, where he holds the triple position as manager, playwright and actor. He also wrote, directed and acted in Shamlet. Set in Taiwan, Li's production tells the story about a second-rate theatrical troupe trying to perform Shakespeare's masterpiece in order to boost its own reputation. We see bits and pieces of Hamlet being performed as the troupe takes its show from city to city.           

          Billed as a "comedy of revenge," Shamlet is structured as a play within a play, in which the actors' on-stage performances and their off-stage lives are humorously interweaved. The play takes the duel scene (Act V, Sc. 2) as its main plot line. It appears three times, at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end of the play, but the result of each performance is different due to interferences by the actors' personal lives. The first time this scene is performed it goes fairly smoothly with the exception of some minor mishaps by the actor who plays Horatio. But as more and more actors become incapacitated because of their personal problems or rivalries with their colleagues, the director tries to keep the performance going by assigning actors to play different roles as each emergency arises. By the final act, the actors no longer know what parts they are playing and they cannot improvise their way out. Shakespeare's grand tragedy collapses in confusion and chaos.           

         Both the mainland Chinese and Taiwanese productions of Hamlet employ the device of role changes. But whereas the Chinese director uses this device to underscore the theme that everyone is Hamlet, the Taiwanese production uses it to achieve comic effect. This is particularly evident in the last act when the actor who plays Laertes leaves the stage because he is so distraught over his financial losses, the actor who plays Hamlet replaces him. The subsequent role changes produce two Laertes and four Hamlets, making the duel between the two adversaries  impossible. All actions grind to a halt and the curtain comes down as the cast members solemnly pledge: "We shall return!"

          To carry the role changes a step further, Li Guoxiu assigns a comic double to all the actors in this play. Thus he himself who plays the company manager is called Li Xiuguo and his troupe's name Pingfeng, which means "screen" in Chinese, is changed to Fengping, which does not mean anything. The Chinese characters in all the other actors' names are also inverted. Since quite a few of Shamlet's actors are popular singers and television stars, the Taiwanese audience must get a good laugh in seeing these familiar personalities playing caricatures of themselves.

          Other comic devices used in this play include technical mistakes, wrong props, forgotten lines and mistaken cues. For example, when the dead king's ghost is supposed to disappear after talking to Hamlet, the wire used to lift him off stage does not move, leaving him stuck on stage for the rest of the play. In Act V, the actor who plays Laertes comes on stage with a lantern instead of a sword. Later he grabs the poisoned sword by mistake and kills Hamlet, forcing the actors to finish this act by improvisation. Because of the frequent role changes, the performance is plagued by actors forgetting their lines. In Act 5, when Laertes forgets his lines, a Court Lady prompts him in full view of the audience. Then she drops the script in her hand and the pages become scattered all over the stage. What follows is a mumble jumble of a speech read from the scattered pages. These comic mishaps also serve the purpose of creating alienation effect, reminding the audiences that they are watching a performance. At one point, Li Guoxiu even shows them the backstage. Bertold Brecht believed that alienation effect could elicit an intellectual response from the audience. Similarly, Li Guoxiu wants to make his audiences think about serious things while making them laugh.      

          In addition to comic techniques used in the performance, Li Guoxiu also appropriates Shakespeare's text for comic effect. For example, Hamlet's dialogue with Horatio about not believing in augury (Act V, Sc. 2) becomes the following exchange in Shamlet:  

 

Hamlet's question of "to be or not to be" is also put in a comic context. As a result of the constant role changes, the characters and actors keep asking themselves the question "Who am I?" The following is an exchange among three actors:

          Although the improvisations and comic disruptions in Shamlet have deconstructed Shakespeare's text beyond recognition, there are some correspondences between the two plays.  The company manager's inability to deal with his wife's adultery is similar to Hamlet's indecision to revenge his father's murder. The triangular relationship between the manager, his wife, and her step-brother and lover mirrors Gertrude's marriages to the past and current king. The young man who is initially cast as Shamlet is always in the shadow of his father because the latter does not want his son to become an actor. The young actor's despondent and melancholy demeanor resembles Hamlet's. The actor playing Laertes is swindled out of all his money by his best friend is a parallel of Hamlet being betrayed by his friends. The secret love affair between a playboy television actor and a popular singer suggests Hamlet and Ophelia's love, but with an Oedipal twist. The television actor, originally cast as Polonius, plays Hamlet in the later acts while the popular singer plays his mother! The actress who plays Ophelia suffers from diarrhea because somebody has put poison in her milk. The eavesdropper who listens in on everyone's conversations is not Polonius but the ghost, who is stuck on stage. While these characters bear only superficial resemblance to their counterparts in Hamlet, they are  a portrait of life in Taiwan.

          The Taiwanese critic Ma Sen characterizes Shamlet as a parody of Hamlet.^[xi] Actually, it is not so much a parody of Shakespeare as a parody of the Taiwan society. The major thesis of this play is that there is no distinction between what happens on stage and what happens in real life. The fragmented Hamlet text and the Fengping Troupe subplots are joined together to form a picture of a divisive society with its infighting and betrayals. As a professional actor, it is not surprising that Li Guoxiu singles out the theater for closer examination. He takes issue with the old Chinese prejudice against actors and the acting profession. The actor who plays Hamlet is tormented by his father's disapproval of his chosen career. His father wants him to study something practical and profitable such as business administration or computer science, not to waste his time on the stage. The young man finally gives up playing Hamlet, not out of his filial obedience, but as an act of defiance. As he tells another actor, "My father always complains about what society has done to him. I don't want to be burdened with his complaints. I want to run away! I don't want to take revenge for him!"^[xii] The company manager also pays a heavy price for his love for the theater. His wife of eighteen years leaves him because he cannot provide a stable income.  Her leave-taking touches upon the theme of "identity crisis" when she says to her husband, "When will you take off your messy make-up and find yourself?"^[xiii]  

          The low status of stage performance is contrasted with the more glamorous television entertainment. The director hired to direct Shamlet has his eye on getting a better-paying television job. To curry favor with a television star, he gives him the plum role of playing Hamlet and demotes the original Hamlet to Horatio, thereby adding to the jealousy and resentment among members of the troupe. In the highly commercialized society of Taiwan, can stage actors resist the lure of television? Is it possible to maintain the integrity of art and still make a profit? These are the questions that all artists in Taiwan must decide. Li Guoxiu himself has been criticized for being a commercial artist. He defends his commercialism by citing Shakespeare as an example. On the back cover of the published script of Shamlet, the biographies of Shakespeare and Li appear side by side. Shakespeare is described not only  as the great Elizabethan dramatist who wrote thirty eight plays but also as the most commercially successful playwright of his time. Li is hailed as the most prolific playwright in the Republic of China who has written thirty two stage plays and more than one hundred television plays. As the manager of Pingfeng Acting Troupe, he has sometimes been denigrated as a commercial playwright.  

Shamlet may be a commercial production for popular entertainment, Li nevertheless raises the important question of what is the relevance of Shakespeare, and by extension all Western cultural icons, to Taiwan? The irony of a Taiwanese troupe performing Hamlet is brought out in the last act. When a stagehand brings two swords onto stage, other characters remark on her "foreign" appearance:

          And the whole play is a satire of this mediocre troupe's vain ambition to perform a difficult foreign play but unable to get it right. After suffering more and more setbacks, the company manager bursts out, "The greatest conflict facing Fengping Troupe now is: we should not perform Shakespeare's play! What's Shakespeare got to do with us Taiwanese?"^[xv]

Yes, indeed. Why should the modern day theater in Taiwan perform the works of a foreign playwright who has been dead for four hundred years? The answer seems to be that Li wants to give Western classics a Chinese characteristic. This point is made humorously in the play by an incompetent actor wanting to play Hamlet. He tells the company manager that of all the famous actors who have played Hamlet, only he can give the role a "Taiwanese flavor." To demonstrate his claim, he begins to speak in Taiwanese slang and turns somersaults like the acrobats in traditional Chinese opera. Li Guoxiu also asserts that he has one advantage over Shakespeare--The great British playwright is dead but he is still alive. The living always prevail over the dead because they can still make things happen. In the case of Shamlet, Li prevented Hamlet's tragedy from happening and changed it into a comedy.

          This play was a big success with the Taiwanese audience, playing to packed houses everywhere it was performed, but its performance at the Shanghai International Shakespeare Festival in 1994 was not so successful. The mainland Chinese audiences were not familiar with all the references to Taiwan and the director's heavy-handed editing did not help the matter any. Moreover, the Shanghai production emphasized the hard life of the characters in the play at the expense of its humor and satire. As a result of this interpretation, the audiences did not know how to react to the performance; they felt confused and lost.^[xvi] The different receptions of Shamlet in Taiwan and China point to the difficulty of intercultural performance. If the two Chinese societies which share a common cultural heritage but have developed separately during the past fifty years cannot come to a common understanding of a play, how much more difficult it is for people from entirely different cultures? The Western audience and Shakespearean scholars may be puzzled and even shocked by what happened to their beloved Hamlet in these two Chinese adaptations discussed in this paper. But as one perceptive scholar points out, "If we are to make the study and performance of Shakespeare fully contemporary and fully international we must worry less about his textual meaning and more about his prodigious appropriation (or misappropriation) in a global context."^[xvii] The appropriation and misappropriation of Hamlet in the two Chinese adaptations made Shakespeare more accessible to the intended audience by addressing their concerns. If Shakespeare is to become truly universal, he must be willing to become a native in the culture that adopts him.               

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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