Reviews 2013
Reviews 2013
✭✭✭✩✩
by Guo Wenjing, directed by Atom Egoyan
Luminato, MacMillan Theatre, Toronto
June 19-22, 2013
Diao Chan: “I would rather be a broken piece of jade than an intact clay tile”
Feng Yi Ting, a Chinese opera having its Canadian premiere at Luminato, works best if considered a multimedia spectacle than as an opera. Guo Wenjing may be one of China’s best-known composers, but in this his first opera narration so outbalances dialogue and action that the 55-minute-long opera does not seem complete in itself as a one-act opera should, but rather as a prelude severed from a much longer work.
The plot is drawn from the enormous 14th-century historical novel The Romance of the Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong (c.1330-1400). It is set during the period 169-280ad when the Han Dynasty was collapsing and three feuding kingdoms arose in its wake only to be united again after a hundred years of war. Feng Yi Ting concerns an event near the beginning of the novel when the Han Dynasty is still intact. Its two characters are the historical figure Lu Bu (died 199) and the fictitious figure Diao Chan invented by Luo. In the novel and the opera, we learn that Wang Yun, a minister under Xian, last of the Han Emperors, wants to be rid of the tyrannical warlord Dong Zhuo. He sends the beautiful woman Diao Chan to two gatherings – one held by Dong and one by Dong’s foster son Lu Bu. As expected both men are enflamed with love for Diao Chan. To set them at odds, Wang promises Diao to Lu in marriage but then gives her to Dong as a concubine. At the key meeting of Diao and Lu in the Phoenix Pavilion (the “Feng Yi Ting” of the title), Diao convinces Lu that he should regard Dong not as his father but as his rival and thus should kill him. Diao exults at the end of Guo’s opera, but the result of Wang’s plan – disaster for all the characters concerned – is never mentioned.
The opera’s main flaw is its libretto written by the composer. After a long overture, Diao Chan (soprano Shen Tiemei) appears and narrates the entire story that precedes her meeting with Lu Bu (countertenor Jiang Qihu). This takes up almost two thirds of the short opera’s running time. Diao Chan’s meeting with Lu Bu is absurdly short compared to the long set-up for it. Lu Bu rushes off, kills Dong Zhao (Ray Jacilda, whose only function is to die), returns with the news and leaves Diao to rejoice. It is the presentation of so much backstory compared to the paucity of dialogue and action that makes the work feel so unsatisfying. It’s pretty much as if Lady Macbeth had told us about the battle Macbeth and the Scots fought against the forces of Norway and Ireland and about his meeting with the Weird Sisters, had her conference with Macbeth and ended with Lady Macbeth exulting that she and Macbeth and killed Duncan. The murder may be an important incident as is the conference leading up to, but it leaves us wanting more.
While the libretto depicts more an excerpt than a complete story, Guo’s music suggests completeness. Themes in the overture recur throughout the opera and are developed in the interludes that separate all the sung sections of the opera. The 15-member orchestra mixes both Western and traditional Chinese instruments like the erhu, dizi, sheng and pipa. Guo’s overall style in its use of tension and rhythmic changes sounds most like a Bartók who had access to non-Western instruments. When Guo accompanies one of the singers, however, he uses a style much more similar to that in Peking Opera. This is likely because both singers sing in the traditional manner of Peking Opera. East may meet West in the orchestra but the mode of vocal production is strictly Chinese. Overall, composer Alice Ping Yee Ho created a more fascinating interplay of Chinese and Western instruments in her score for the opera The Lesson of Da Ji, seen just last month, which also had the advantage of a more eventful libretto.
Shen Tiemei and Jiang Qihu give intensely committed performances enhanced by the graceful use of the traditional gestural language of Peking Opera. Ken Lam leads the orchestra in a taut account of the score which is strangely more eventful than what happens on stage.
The most exciting aspect of Feng Yi Ting is Atom Egoyan’s direction. Since Diao Chan is the opera’s storyteller and has the role of manipulating Lu Bu to commit murder, Egoyan has her also act as the opera’s stage manager. Before the opera begins we see two small figurines, male and female, on the apron of the stage. During Diao Chan’s narration, Egoyan has her take the two and place them in a model of the Phoenix Pavilion on stage. When she refers to Lu Bu she gestures stage right as if using magical powers to draws in Jiang Qihu standing rigid as if he were a life-sized puppet on a stand. Costume designer Han Feng dresses Lu Bu in the traditional Peking Opera role of wusheng, or a young male who fights. Diao Chan, in contrast, wears a modern red haute-couture gown and hood, suggesting, perhaps, that what we see is a modern version of an ancient tale.
At the same time Egoyan blends the onstage action and imagery with both front and back projection. Sometimes it is live video projected onto the back wall of Lu Bu seen head on as he glides across the stage. Sometimes it is Cameron Davis’s photographic negative version of the action where event occur that are not depicted on stage, most notably the floating away of the Lu Bu figurine out of Diao Chan’s hands.
The best effect of all, however, is Egoyan’s manipulation of the surtitles in English and Mandarin. These are projected on the back wall of the stage and along the bottom frame of the set. When Lu Bu sings his one aria about destroying Dong Zhao, Egoyan has Roman letters and Chinese characters start to drop off the projected titles and float away. For anyone who knows what happened after the action of the opera, this is the strongest suggestion we get that Lu Bu’s murder of Dong will lead to the crumbling of the entire Han Dynasty. At the end when Diao Chan sings of her success in playing her role, surtitles appear with gaps and letters and characters float in to fill them and complete the sense.
Feng Yi Ting may be visually beautiful and musically rich, but that can’t disguise the libretto’s flaw of telling a tale so awkwardly as to render it neither emotionally or intellectually compelling. The best news is how inventive Egoyan has become as an opera director who, unlike some, pays close attention to both the words and the music and uses his imagination to enhance, not overwhelm or undermine, an opera’s impact.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: (top) Shen Tiemei and Jiang Qihu; (middle) miniature Phoenix Pavilion and shadows.. ©2012 Stephanie Berger.
For tickets, visit www.luminatofestival.com.
2013-06-22
Feng Yi Ting