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Where is love?
The questions that love raises are among some of the most difficult to answer. What is it that makes us love? What triggers desire? Where does this force come from?
Commissioned by the Hong Kong Arts Festival and the Singapore Arts Festival, the National Theatre Company of China produces the play which premiered at the Grand Theatre in the Hong Kong Cultural Centre on March 3. The six sold-out shows in Hong Kong turned out to be an unexpected hit. With 9,600 tickets sold, it became the second most successful drama in the Hong Kong Arts Festival's 33-year history, after the Beijing People's Art Theatre's signature work "Tea House" which sold 10,000 tickets 18 years ago. "Besides our efficient marketing, people came to the play partly to admire Meng's unique directing style, partly because they were curious about a mainland theatre production and others are fans of the leading actor Liu Ye," said Katy Cheng, marketing manager of the Hong Kong Arts Festival. "Amber" is running in Shanghai until March 20 and then it will be performed at Beijing's Capital Theatre from March 25 to April 3. Its run at the Singapore Arts Festival will be from May 26 to 29. The story is a bit of a cliche, similar to but simpler than the film "21 Grams" staring Sean Penn. Love begins A heart-transplant throws Gao Yuan (Liu Ye) and Shen Xiaoyou (Yuan Quan) into each other's lives. Shen is a guide at a museum of natural history. She spends her days with dinosaurs as her companions. Her tranquil appearance hides a burning desire for love. Her fiancee dies in a car accident and his heart is transplanted into the playboy Gao's chest. Shen keeps a close eye on Gao after the transplant and finally cannot resist seducing him, all for the sake of listening to the beat of the heart of her late fiancee. The two approach each other with hidden agendas, not speaking from their hearts and going against their own natures, tormenting each other. Nevertheless, they finally fall deeply in love. Written when she was pregnant, Liao put a lot of her concern for life into the love story. Gao has suffered from serious heart problems for many years, arrogantly claiming that life is a game. He says that when he faces the world, he wants to keep his distance. He claims to be a hedonist even in the face of death and the inevitable decay of ageing. He feels that arrogance is the best stance he can take. This is the choice that Liao makes for Gao. "I have always been a pessimist and been lukewarm in my attitude towards life," said the playwright who gave birth to a baby eight months ago. "We are powerless to influence life and fate and we have always been powerless to influence them. All we can do is to maintain some dignity," she said. However, she said she has changed since becoming pregnant in 2003. "I became fearful, cautious, full of wild hopes. I refused to listen to bad news, look at bloodstains, or hear sad stories, unrealistically I hoped that this would keep my to-be-born infant at a distance from the ugly and the suffering," she explained. She saw the birth of the baby as a miracle which changed an independent, headstrong woman into a hamstrung mother. "For the first time in my life, I grew fearful of death. I started to think that I wanted to live forever in ignorance, not for the sake of change but through solicitude," she said. In her mind, life is a miracle, even if it is fragile and ordinary and even if it cannot be explained. In the play, Shen makes Gao see this miracle. The Don Juan-type who used to make fun of life and prepares himself for dying at any time finally said: "Because of you, I fear dying." More obviously than the implicit exploration of attitudes towards life, love is still the focus of the play since Liao started the story with the sentence "My beloved." In the play she wants to portray the complexity of love. "Pure and strongly held emotions are infectious. Yet I also know that emotion is like water in a pond. The purest love also has an unfathomable aspect," she said. She shares her doubts about love with the audience. What sort of person could you truly love? What kind of smell, what joke, what temperature and humidity and what type of physical being or soul? What misunderstanding or coincidence makes you love? Do you love during a certain phase of the moon? "You think that what you like is actually aimless and boring, and that what you dislike is full of magical charm. And this, just like all basic issues of humanity, can never have an answer, yet it creates unbounded expression and countless moving examples. And the love between Gao and Shen is one expression or one example," Liao said. When the story begins, Shen enters Gao's life to seduce him not for Gao himself but for her fiancee's heart, while Gao dates Shen because he tends to have an affair with every pretty woman he meets. However, at the end of the story, Shen has to face the fact that she loves Gao, the person, instead of the heart. Her beloved is no longer her late fiancee; Gao has taken his place. Gao has to confess that he has fallen in love with Shen; she is not like his previous partners. Poetic lines Liao has created very poetic lines for the play, as she believes that spoken drama needs beautiful language, and that only lightly sorrowful words can express love. Director Meng skilfully presents a modern fable of a woman's pursuit of love in a world of fake sentiments and forgeries, set in a contemporary China of perplexing social and moral values. Meng's loyal fans will be glad to discover that he has retained his unique style in "Amber." Yet, they may feel disappointed at the same time because he makes no breakthroughs. "The issues about sex and modern society lifestyle are a bit of a cliche, but the topic expanded to meinu zuojia (beautiful woman author) is interesting," said Kristine Kwok, a reporter from the South China Morning Post, who watched "Rhinoceros in Love" in Beijing in 2002. However, Meng himself does not think breakthroughs are important. He answered when questioned by the Hong Kong press: "What's important is to continue with a poetic aesthetic and a resolute attitude." As in all his previous works, Meng uses jokes, ridicule and parody in the 140-minute play. The loose storyline is deliberately disrupted or it suddenly sprouts offshoots. Between Gao's affairs with different women, Meng adds an amusing interlude here, a joke or two there, or inserts a song or a choral recitation. He even includes a Tianjin kuaiban; a ballad ridiculing erotic writing on the Internet, a shameless pretty female writer who draws public attention with tales of her sexual experiences, and observations of decadent life, interests and moral values. The exaggerated and affected way the subject of sex is avoided only serves, in a "nudge-nudge, wink-wink" manner, to make the intention more satirical. It is a pity that as the Cantonese speaking audience in Hong Kong could not understand some slang and nursery rhymes from northern China, they could not appreciate Meng's black humour very well. But they did burst into laughter at the performers' exaggerated movements and could figure out the meaning. "It's a brand-new theatre experience for me, because Meng's presentation is different from most Hong Kong directors. The only problem is that because of the language barrier, it's hard for me to catch every line and follow some details that seem not relevant to the love between Gao and Shen," said Li Wing-Man, a 22-year-old modern languages and intercultural studies student at Chinese University of Hong Kong . Except for a few theatre-goers such as Kwok who were left a little disappointed, most of the audience enjoyed the show very much. "It is fantastic, from the talented performers who can sing and dance, to the imaginative backdrop design; from the cool costumes to the rock band in one scene. And above all, the play brings me a powerful dramatic shock effect," said Lorna Christofis, a business woman from Zimbabwe after watching the premiere. Good co-operation In addition to the well-known director and playwright couple Meng and Liao, music director Yao Chien, choreographer Jin Xing, set designer Zhang Wu, multimedia designer Feng Jiangzhou, lighting designer Tan Shaoyuan, costume designer Zhao Yan and the leading actor Liu Ye and actress Yuan Quan have all made great contributions to the success of the play. Liu and Yuan were classmates at the China Central Academy of Drama. Liu's debut movie "Postman in the Mountain" (1998) was chosen as the audience's favourite at the Montreal International Film Festival. His acting in "Lan Yu" won him the Best Actor Award at the 38th Golden Horse Awards in Taiwan and his role in the movie "The Foliage" won him the Best Actor Award at the 24th Golden Rooster Awards in the Chinese mainland. Liu is one of the best-known film and television actors in China. "Amber" is his first theatrical work since he graduated from the Academy in 2000. But his acting on stage is impressive. He portrays a sexy, restrained yet volcanic Gao, with a look of perplexity in his eyes. Yuan delivers a few long and touching monologues and recitations such as the story of Orfeo and a Chinese ghost legend. In the most tranquil role on stage, she vividly contrasts with Shen's churning inferno of emotions. "The role of Shen resembles me very much in personality, but it does not mean it is easy to act because it limits my imagination of the role from an objective view, so at the beginning I felt very unnatural in it," said Yuan. "It was director Meng and choreographer Jin that helped me come out of myself and find a fit mental condition for the character." Last but not least, why is the play called "Amber?" "It's just an unusual word that carries a bit of sorrow," according to Meng. Actually the word only occurs once, in the last sentence of the play. At the hospital bed, Shen says to Gao, "You sleep in my arms as quiet as pure
amber."
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