"Red represents a passion, a romance, but it is not an ordinary romance, it is a dangerous romance; black is first and foremost an anti-freedom, anti-inner thing, but at the same time it has a kind of calmness that returns to dust and earth." This is director Meng Jinghui's understanding of "red and black". As one of the banners of China's "avant-garde drama" in the past 20 years, Meng Jinghui's works have always attracted much attention and even been controversial. On October 15, as the opening play of the Wuzhen Drama Festival, "Red and Black" was hard to find, and more than 1,000 spectators witnessed Meng Jinghui's new interpretation of this literary classic at the Wuzhen Grand Theatre. From December 10th to 12th, the new version of "Red and Black" will meet the Shanghai audience for the first time at the Oriental Art Center, and Mei Ting, Zhang Hancheng, Luo Huan and other representative members of the "Empty Flower Group" of Meng Jinghui Drama Studio will jointly perform a chase of ideals and contradictions.
For the adaptation of literary masterpieces, loyalty to the text or "subversion" of the classic has always been a proposition that needs to be gamed. "The Red and the Black" is the first critical realist masterpiece in nineteenth-century European literature, and Stendhal far surpassed his contemporaries in the excavation of psychological depth, creating a precedent for "stream-of-consciousness novels" and "psychological novels" in later generations. Meng Jinghui's earliest contact with "The Red and the Black" was in college, when he felt that this was just a romance novel, and the "Red and Black" that he put on the stage was a "work about love and beyond love, about politics and beyond politics, about you and me beyond you and me."
"Today's young people may not have time to read, so I read it for them and then show it on stage to show everyone how beautiful it is." This is Meng Jinghui's ideal for adapting famous works. To achieve this goal, the restoration of the plot is not the first priority, but to show the most important value of the work, especially to find the part that interests modern people, "they are not interested, you perform fake".
At first glance, "The Red and the Black" is still the familiar Meng Jinghui — there are still the signature shouts, table lifting, jokes, games, monologues and the use of play-within-a-play in Meng Jinghui's plays. There is also a strange taste in the familiar, and the play follows the original book to make certain trade-offs, focusing on the emotional entanglement of the three characters. On the stage, Zhang Wu, a visual artist who has cooperated with Meng Jinghui many times, uses a hundred giant steel brackets to build a three-story "Desire Pavilion", and as the lights continue to change, in the surreal space constructed by light and shadow, red is entangled with black, black and red are mixed, and the contradictions of Jullien, the pain of Madame de Rainer, and the jealousy of Mathilde gradually unfold.
Zhang Yicheng, who plays Yu Lian, interprets the "ice" of his inner entanglement and appearance as calm, and the performances of Mei Ting and Luo Huan have their own "fire". Large inner monologues, multi-Chinese switching, a large number of action scheduling, and even jumping into the audience, Zhang Yicheng said that in the original novel, Stendhal described the characters' hearts a lot, but there was very little dialogue, and the reinterpretation on the stage for the audience, "don't try to understand what we are saying, just feel."
For Mei Ting, the cooperation with Meng Jinghui is not only to challenge herself, but also to find a kind of "danger" in the unique Meng aesthetic, "to play Madame de Rainer, you have to accept the passion of her love, the burning of desire, the loss of not getting, and the deep jealousy." More than 20 years ago, Mei Ting had cooperation with Meng Jinghui, and her intuitive feeling is that "Meng Dao's stage needs you to hold and release, you need to have a lot of energy to release, you must have this momentum." Taking on "The Red and the Black," she said, "Read the book at least three times." The way actors respect themselves is to do a good job professionally. Watching movies, dramas, and books are all essential. I respect my profession and love it, that's it. ”
When Zhang Yicheng, Luo Huan, Li Zhihao, Yang Zuofu, Lü Jing, Guo Bingkun, Zhang Gongchang, Chen Yuxin, Liu Shuang, Zhang Yaqian and other members of the "Empty Flower Group" switch identities on the stage of destiny, looking for "happiness belonging to a minority" in the pavilion ladder built by desire, "What we want to express is a spiritual core, hoping to accompany the audience to share, soar, put aside the confinement, and imagine freely in these three hours." Zhang Saidangcheng said.
Column Editor-in-Chief: Shi Chenlu Text Editor: Shi Chenlu
Source: Author: Shi Chenlu