Sympathetic but never sentimental, comic but not frivolous, Theatre O from Britain has won worldwide acclaim with its sharp and inventive plays which mix mime, slapstick comedy, fantastic soundtracks and dance.
Now the company will tour China with its 2000 production Three Dark Tales, jointly presented by the British Council and the China International Culture Exchange Center.
Three Dark Tales is about the everyday oppressions that keep us down and wear us out; oppressions that we occasionally, dramatically and emphatically overcome.
It premiered at the Edinburgh 2000 Festival where it won the Total Theatre Award. The production also won the Stage Newspaper Acting Excellence-Ensemble Award in 2001.
Beijing's theatergoers can see the play at The People's Art Theatre from Thursday to Sunday. Then the troupe will move to Guangzhou, capital of South China's Guangdong Province, from November 29-30, and to Shanghai from December 5-9.
In the show, four performers enact three intertwined macabre stories about three office colleagues whose lives are disintegrating: Tibble, an extravagantly hassled husband and office drudge and his barracuda wife; Amelia, who wants to escape from her parents' control to be an opera star; and Freddie, office manager and failed father who is abandoned by his family.
Tragic and Comic
All three are tragicomedies, and each can stand alone, either in style or plot.
The first one, Dream on Mr Tibble, is for those who are oppressed by battered black briefcases, apron strings, and the spiked heal of a wife's stiletto.
Tibble -- played by Joseph Alford who also directs the production -- is a meek, obsequious man whom we glimpse rising in the morning, brushing his teeth and preparing breakfast for his cold, cruel wife. His wife, played by the physically angular and melodramatically angry Sarah Coxon, makes loud noises of contempt and dissatisfaction. She is brazen, emasculating and outrageously funny as she talks stridently in an invented language and demolishes her henpecked husband.
Work, too, is a nightmare: The elevator is full of snotty yuppies; his boss (Frank, the subject of the third story) is an arrogant pest, convincingly played by Lucien MacDougall, who loads him with tasks and forgets to pay him. But there is solace at hand in the form of a friendly, pretty typist (Amelia, subject of the second story).
Home involves the further torture of dinner with his wife, who then goes to the opera with his repulsive neighbor, the oily Dr Savage.
The second story, The Unfortunate Predicament of Amelia Sas, features a lonely woman, played by Carolina Valdes, who is trapped into fulfilling her parents' dreams. She was raised at the dining room table and her life is divided into five-year plans.
Sharing her apartment with her goldfish, and the voices on the answering machine, she dreams of being Maria Callas and craves more from life than the "ping" of her microwave.
Frank's Wardrobe portrays the 40-something office manager Frank, who finds himself with a family that's too big and a house that's getting smaller.
By day, his story is one of tyrannical power and self-congratulation; by night, he seethes with bitterness. Finally his wife and kids leave him with an empty refrigerator, a goodbye note and a house as silent as the grave.
With no real friends to moan to and no family to scream at, Frank is left with nothing but his memories, fears and the mess in his kitchen.
Creative Cast
These tales may be dark in theme but they are theatrically luminous, because the four performers are all virtuosos, bringing extraordinary energy to their explorations of the joy and wretchedness of the human story.
Alford is something of a genius in his compact, intense frame. From the moment Mr Tribble comes hurtling out of the wardrobe this play is alight with physical acting and a wonderfully surreal style which delights, entertains and horrifies.
But it seems almost unfair to praise any one actor over another. Each of the four performers works devilishly hard.
At times, they almost seem like machines, going at full speed for almost the entire 90 minutes of the show, providing a bevy of sound effects as a complement to the frenetic movement that pauses only briefly while the stories change.
The whole show is played on a simple set with two rails of clothes and an ungainly wardrobe, a piece of furniture used with considerable invention. It appears as a bed, a door of a house, a gate in the office and a lift.
Actors use clothes stacked on racks to rapidly change persona, or props to intimate other objects and ideas.
The wardrobe is a Pandora's box of activity. In the last tale, the wardrobe functions as a stage within a stage, employed almost as a platform for a puppet show.
To help chronicle and condense years of marriage, its doors slam open and shut. Pumping steam, and emanating a string of sounds, it sadistically truncates words and meaning.
Wild strains of music, from Bach to Verdi, from samba to opera, are employed to underscore the activity on stage.
There are no masks in Three Dark Tales. The cast members use their faces so expressively one wonders if they could make dialogue obsolete.
Their faces are but one of the arsenals of tools they seem to have at their disposal, however. The others are dance and other movement, and remarkable tongues that deliver words, foreign or domestic, or just sounds, with amazing dexterity.
The words are employed for an effect like music. Since language is rarely relied on to advance the story in any usual way, a stream of English here and there can collapse suddenly into another language, mixing with strings of gibberish.
In other words, inflection and rhythm can literally take on an importance equal to the meaning of the words.
Critics Enticed
Some Chinese drama fans appreciated the show after they saw a video of it.
Ren Ming, well-known director and president of the Beijing People's Art Theatre, said: "British theatre usually reminds us Chinese theatergoers of Shakespeare, but Theatre O gives us a chance to know contemporary British theatrical productions.
"Theatre O pays more attention to the human beings themselves rather than the stories. It can inspire Chinese counterparts in terms of both theatrical styles and concepts," he said.
Ren believes the production will be well-received by Chinese audiences. Though it is unbound by conventional narrative structure, and performed in English with some invented language, the performers' rich body language and facial expressions help the audience understand the characters' internal lives.
Local drama critic Man Yan added: "The stories are very close to Chinese people's lives nowadays. The three office clerks have something in their lives that grinds them down, which often happens in our lives today and is easily understood."
Man also said that even with no complicated relationship between the roles, or a complete story line, the three movements succeed in vividly mirroring people's daily lives by exaggerating the dramatic "somethings" that can oppress people in their daily lives.
(China Daily November 19, 2002)
