Beijing's theatre venues will be filled with the scent of plum blossom in April. More than 15 plays starring 400 award winners will be performed in the capital to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Plum Awards, China's highest prize for drama, which is presented by the Ministry of Culture.
Thunderstorm
"Thunderstorm," one of the greatest modern Chinese dramas, will kick off the month of celebrations, with performances at the Capital Theatre from tonight to Saturday.
Premiered by the Beijing People's Art Theatre in 1954, "Thunderstorm" is the most frequently adapted and staged work by renowned dramatist Cao Yu (1910-96), due to its detailed plot and strong dramatic effects.
The full-length modern drama features complicated relationships among the members and servants of a large well-off family and the family's disintegration as a result of the morbidity and corruption of the 1930s.
Coal mine owner Zhou Puyuan is the patriarch of the family. Thirty years ago, Zhou had an affair with a maid called Shiping and she had two sons. After he marries a wealthy woman -- Fan Yi -- he keeps the elder son Zhou Ping and drives Shiping away with the younger son.
Shiping marries butler Lu Gui, and they have a daughter called Sifeng. One day, Shiping, who has become old and ugly, turns up before him, throwing everything into chaos.
The play was premiered in the 1930s in Chongqing, but was later presented by the Beijing People's Art Theatre in 1954 and has become one of the most popular items in the theatre's repertoire.
Quite a few well-known actors and actresses have won fame from the play and also some established directors have produced their own versions.
But this "Thunderstorm" will be very different from any previous ones.
Directed by Xu Xiaozhong, vice-chairman of Chinese Dramatists' Association, the four scenes plus the prelude and the ending will star five actors playing Zhou Puyuan, three in the part of Zhou Ping, three as Fan Yi, three playing Shiping and four as Sifeng.
Pu Cunxin, currently one of the best actors at the Beijing People's Art Theatre, will perform Zhou Ping in Scene I. Pu is also the latest Zhou Ping of the theatre.
All the performers are Plum Award winners in the past two decades. Some even gained two awards. With different characteristics, they inspire each other and harmonize the whole play.
In addition, it is the first time to stage the prelude and the ending, which Cao wrote but never has been performed before. "It is also to fulfill Cao's last wish," said Xu.
Renowned actor Zheng Rong and actress Di Xin, both in their 70s, will perform Zhou Puyuan and Fan Yi in the prelude and ending. Zheng and Di played the two roles in the 1954 version.
White Snake
The Peking Opera "The Legend of White Snake" will be the second major play to be shown this month. It will run at Poly Theatre from April 5 to 7.
Adapted from a popular fairy tale, the play was first written by Tian Han (1896-1968) in 1947, then revised in 1953.
White Snake -- the fairy Bai Suzhen -- who has practiced Buddhism for thousands of years and can metamorphose into an attractive lady, wants to experience human love.
She falls in love with Xu Xian at the Broken Bridge on West Lake and wants to marry him. Fa Hai, a monk at Gold Mountain Temple, prevents the fairy snake from marrying him by using his magic power to subdue her and put her under the Leifeng Pagoda. Many years later, Xiao Qing, her little sister, who is actually a green snake, comes to rescue her.
Since it is one of the most popular repertoires, many established Peking Opera artists of different schools played the White Snake. The biggest names include Mei Lanfang, Du Jinfang, Zhao Shiji, Shang Xiaoyun, Zhang Junqiu, Li Shiji, Li Bingshu and Gu Zhengqiu.
But this time, young actors and actresses from different schools and from different companies will perform in the one play. Zhang Huoding of Cheng School and Dong Yuanyuan and Wei Haiming of Mei School who respectively come from Hong Kong and Taiwan will star the White Snake.
"Peking Opera is an art of jue (the Chinese word for a famous actor or actress). Real fans of Peking Opera look forward to a play for a jue's performance. This time we will bring together many jue in the play to delight the fans," said Cao Yunqing, director of the play.
"This 'Legend of White Snake' is a huge project. It is by no means easy to gather so many well-known artists together. My job is to unite them well. I hope the audiences could enjoy different types of arias in one play," he said.
Anna Christie
Many local theatres will also bring their productions to the capital. Among them, Guangzhou Modern Drama Company's "Anna Christie" is an eye-catching piece.
Directed by Wang Xiaoying, now the vice-president of the China National Drama Theatre, the small-theatre play will be shown at Beibingmasi Theatre from April 5 to 10.
Premiered in Guangzhou, South China's Guangdong Province in 1997, the play also took part in 2000 Beijing Small-Theatre Drama Festival and was acclaimed one of the best works in that festival.
Critic Tian Benxiang said: "The play is enjoyable both for Eugene O'Neill's story and the actors' wonderful performance. But the most important fact is that this drama best displays director Wang's talent, among all his works I have watched."
One of O'Neill's (1883-1953) best-known works, this romantic "play of the sea" depicts a young woman searching for redemption from her dark past and her astonishing struggle to deserve the love she desperately needs.
O'Neill, the great US writer, is at his most romantic when hard-living sailors and immigrant roustabouts bring this incredibly modern story of love and hope to life.
Emotions are boldly portrayed in O'Neill's dramas, to the point where they can either seem slightly laughable and a bit ridiculous, or simply the natural expression of fearlessly passionate people trying to cleanse themselves of lies before reveling in the truth.
So it is to the credit of the keen-eyed director Wang and the Plum-Award-winning actors Li Bangyu, Zhang Yechuan and Actress Wang Hong in his production of "Anna Christie."
The story has the quality of a sea shanty -- a simple folk tale that might easily be passed from one generation to the next. At its center are a rugged old Swedish sea captain, Chris Christopher son (Li Bangyu), who has spent years at sea and is now in charge of a coal barge working the ports of New York and Boston, and his daughter Anna Christie (Wang Hong), with whom he is reunited after 15 years.
Anna has spent most of her life on her cousins' Minnesota farm, where she was treated as little more than an indentured servant and where, at 16, she was raped by one of her young relatives. After fleeing the farm, she worked briefly as a nanny before falling into prostitution.
Now in search of refuge, and a bit of a payback from her elderly, ever-absent father, she takes up temporary residence on his barge. She is brimming with hatred for men and unable to reveal her sordid recent past to her father because he prefers to believe in her purity.
When Christopherson rescues several fishermen one night after a bad storm, one of them, Mat (Zhang Yechuan), a muscular young Irishman with a big ego and a grandly innocent romanticism, instantly falls in love with Anna. But Anna's fervent hope for redemption and marriage is thwarted -- both by the vision of her purity that Mat shares with her father and by her need for brutal honesty. The relationship between Anna and Mat grows increasingly volatile, and just how it will finally resolve itself is left tantalizingly up in the air.
(China Daily April 2, 2003)
