Reviews 2011
Reviews 2011
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created and directed by Dean Gilmour & Michele Smith Theatre Smith-Gilmour/Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre/Luminato, Isabel Bader Theatre, Toronto
June 15-18, 2011
LU XUN blossoms premiered in Shanghai in 2007 and the toured to Beijing, Hong Kong, Guangzhou and Macau. Now as part of Luminato, this first-ever collaboration between a Canadian theatre company and one from China is now enjoying its North American premiere. The Canadian company in question is Theatre Smith-Gilmour, now celebrating its 30th anniversary, which has previously explored the short stories of Anton Chekhov and Katherine Mansfield on stage. With members of the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre, it turns its attention to the short stories of Lu Xun (1881-1936), a man acclaimed as the founder of modern Chinese literature.
Lu Xun’s stories reflect the turbulence in the China during its transition from its last dynasty to a republic following the Xinhai Revolution. Theatre Smith-Gilmour dramatizes five of his stories--”A Small Incident”, “Ah Chang and the Book of the Hills and the Sea”, “Knowledge is a Crime”, “Kong Yiji” and “The New Year’s Sacrifice”--written between 1919 and 1924. As a framing device, Dean Gilmour plays the aged Lu Xun, as he writes the stories that suddenly come to life around him. They begin with “A Small Incident” with Gilmour as Lu Xun, who tells the story of an accident in which his rickshaw driver, urged by Lu Xun to go faster, runs over an old woman. It’s an incident he says he has never been able to expunge from his memory. Then with “Ah Chang”, the character identified with Lu Xun moves backwards in time to his childhood and grows in age with each successive story.
In “Ah Chang and the Book of the Hills and the Sea”, Wang Yangmeizi plays the Lu Xun character as a child whose beloved pet mouse is killed. Lu Xun’s nanny Ah Chang (Michele Smith) blames the cat. Lu Xun who had already looked down her, now despises she confesses she did killed it accidentally, begs forgiveness and makes amends. In “Knowledge is a Crime”, the Lu Xun figure (now Guo Hongbo) decides to go to school and is enthralled by the banalities he teacher utters, such as “The world is round”, which are all news to him. Lu Xun is then disturbed to discover that under the new revolutionary regime that knowledge is a crime and in his guilt dreams of a an oil-bean covered hell where souls slip and slide for eternity.
The final two stories are longer and much more serious in tone. The Lu Xun figure (Wang Yangmeizi again), now working at shop selling hot wine, notices how badly the owner (Zhao Sihan) and the clients treat the poor man Kong Yiji (Dean Gilmour) because he repeatedly steals from his masters and is punished. Kong had studies the classics but never passed the official examination and so had no way to make a living. As a link to the previous story, the first crime we see is Kong’s theft of a book where he proudly proclaims, “Stealing a book is not a crime.” When Kong’s legs are broken and he is reduced to dragging himself along the ground, Lu Xun is disturbed to find that the shop denizens still show the man no pity while the owner continues to demand her 19 pennies from him.
In the last and longest story, Lu Xun (Guo Hongbo again), now a young man, goes to visit his uncle. There he encounters Xiang Linsao (Zhao Sihan), an old woman he remembers from the past, who stops him to ask if people become ghosts after they die or go to hell. Xiang has suffered an arranged marriage twice and has twice become a widow. Lu Xun’s aunt and uncle show pity in hiring her as a maid after her first widowing, but are more skeptical after her second and eventually throw her out because widows are thought to bring bad luck, especially at the time of the New Years Sacrifice. After her final expulsion, she becomes the pariah of the village whose death is viewed as auspicious.
In terms of drama the play moves from the question posed by “A Small Incident”-- namely “When do other people matter?”--through a mostly comic view of the world the the next two stories to a tragic one in final two. Despite these links there is little forward momentum in the show and the stories’ links can only be perceived on reflection after the the show has ended. This happens mostly because the underlying theme tends to get lost amid all the physical theatre riffs the company makes along the way. The imitation of dogs, cats, farm animals, schoolchildren, people celebrating New Year’s are so delightful in themselves, we tend to pay more attention to them than to the stories they enliven.
While I wished I had had a greater sense of where each story was heading at the time, the play has grown on me in retrospect. As one might expect, Dean Gilmour is a master of mime and has numerous occasions to show off skill, most notably when, with just a twist of his body, he plays both a man holding a mouse by the tail and the bewildered mouse itself. It hard to believe that Smith and Gilmour had to use an interpreter to communicate with their Chinese counterparts because the three actors are so seamlessly integrated into the action. Perhaps the two most memorable scenes are when he have a glimpse of all the actors sliding about in Lu Xun’s vision of hell or, quite magically, when the young Lu Xun opens the Book of the Hills and the Sea, a collection of adventure tales and Chinese mythology, and we suddenly see the cast as a whole array of fantastic creatures surrounding the boy as soon as he opens the book. Theatre Smith-Gilmour, acting on an empty stage in all-black costumes, shows how little is needed to create vivid theatrical scenes.
The show is ultimately melancholy in mood. The selection of stories shows that Lu Xun finds that neither revolutionary zeal nor traditional superstition leads to a more compassionate society where people do not require outcasts for self-affirmation. We must be grateful that Theatre Smith-Gilmour has undertaken this partnership in making Lu Xun better known along with his concerns that raise questions for those in both the East and the West.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Dean Gilmour, Wang Yangmeizi (lying down), Guo Hongbo, Michele Smith, Adam Paolozza and Zhao Sihan. ©2007 Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre.
For Tickets, visit www.luminato.com.
2011-06-17
LU XUN blossoms