William Shakespeare wrote in the famous play Romeo and Juliet: "Don't swear by pointing to the moon, it is fickle, every month there are profits and losses; if you swear by it, maybe your love will be as impermanent as it is." He borrowed the love tragedy of a pair of young boys and girls affected by family relations to tell the essence of the "impermanence" of love.
Text | annie
Breakup moments on stage
During the 65th Avignon Theatre Festival in 2011, French contemporary playwright Pascal Rambert created the duo monologue play "The End of Love" based on his own experience.
It's a suffocating work in which the two actors play a couple about to break up, featuring the last explosive fight before they parted.
The script consists of two parts of monologues, in which the playwright strips away the words of both sides in a complete quarrel and presents them separately. Over the years, The End of Love has been translated into many languages and has been staged around the world. The performance takes the form of two actors dressed in their daily costumes, tearing each other's souls apart on a rehearsal hall-like stage, and the theater light close to the incandescent lighting effect makes the actors pale and green.
Stills from the French version of "The End of Love", photo by Marc Domage / Courtesy of the French Structure Troupe
We don't know exactly what the hero and heroine went through in this relationship. The man said, "I've had enough. I'm in the net, in the sails, and I'm already disgusted by this situation. "I loved you." The woman said, "It's disgusting, the air is smelly, you stink the air." "We need to separate."
The whole play is made up of such fast-paced broken short sentences, and the two sides complain, insult, and be embarrassed. The French novelist Tanguy Viel gave a precise comment after seeing the work: "Although the audience does not move their bodies, they can still feel that this is the inner battle they have been experiencing when they leave the theater." ”
Every sentence in the script makes people feel familiar, there is no language, nationality, gender boundaries, as if what is being staged on the stage is the bridge section that is being staged in their own lives. Although each couple chooses a different lifestyle, they really go to the point of parting, and the words are roughly similar, even if they grit their teeth and admit that they once loved, or scold each other with affection.
Interestingly, 11 years before he wrote The End of Love, Lambert also wrote a Book called The Beginning of Love. The work was extremely romantic, and the stage was covered with French chansons from beginning to end. The playwright holds a magnifying glass and grinds "How Love Begins" into powder and brings it to the audience.
"The Beginning of Love" also comes from Lambert's own experience, there is no specific storyline, and every sentence in the play is still like coming out of the audience's own life, as if the time and place are favorable, and between words, love happens.
Lambert poured his life into a set of plays that could be watched in comparison, and in 11 years, the love stories became endless blades that hurt each other. Now, some theaters like to put two works together and perform at the same time, performed by the same group of actors. Without an 11-year time span, Shakespeare's "impermanence" flashed dramatically overnight.
Stills from "Love Before Dawn Breaks"
For drama actors, breakup scenes are especially difficult to perform. Li Haotian, an actor at Lin Zhaohua Drama Studio, told me that when acting in a breakup scene, actors need to deal with complex emotions with rich layers and grasp the scale. "Everyone has the experience of falling in love and breaking up, if you use too much force, the actor will bring himself to the stage, and what the audience sees is not the role." 」
In 2007, Li Haotian played the male lead of a drama for the first time, starring in the drama "13 Million Single Bathtubs" directed by Taiwanese director Xu Sixian at the Beijing Renyi Experimental Theater. At the time of the creation, the population of Beijing was about 13 million, and the creator hoped that through this work, the audience would be guided to think about the general emotional dilemma of people in big cities.
The work is about a couple going from love to breakup, and in particular, the story uses flashbacks, a narrative favored by "cunning" screenwriters. After the performance begins, the audience first witnesses the scene of the protagonists breaking up, then retraces the complete love experience with them, and finally leaves the theater in the sigh of "knowing today, why did you know it in the first place".
Stills from Marriage Story
"After playing this play, I was a little depressed. In fact, how many times can a person divide his hands in a lifetime? Acting breakups are so painful that you have to experience a fierce emotional shock every night. "Even after more than ten years, recalling the situation at that time, Li Haotian still felt a palpitation in his heart, his expression was bleak, and his voice became more and more low." At that time, everyone was very curious about the bathtub in the title, and the screenwriter felt that the bathtub and the breakup were very compatible, it was a private space, and many people liked to be in the bathtub in a daze or vent sadness. ”
When creating "Thirteen Million Single Bathtubs", Lin Zhaohua's "Great General Kou Liulan" was also rehearsed in human art. It was an unmitigated tragedy: the Roman nobleman Marcius, who had made military merits and earned the title of "Curliuland", gradually lost the support of the commoners, was exiled, and later assassinated in the war for betraying the new lord.
"I felt depressed during the rehearsal, so I went to the next crew to have fun, as if when a person is tormented by love and in pain, the hero's fall is not as miserable as his." Li Haotian said.
Can morality judge feelings?
Over the years, I have talked to many actors about character development, and without exception, they all believe that there is no essential difference between acting in a break-up scene and acting in other types of plays. So, where does the pain caused to the actors by the breakup scene come from?
Stills from "Bouquet of Love"
In the 1970s, the famous Swedish director Ernst Ingmar Bergman created the six-episode TV movie "The Marriage Situation", which he adapted into a film and drama after its success. According to Bergman's account, his love history is very rich, with 5 wives, 9 children, and an "epic number of lovers" in his lifetime. "Marriage Situation" pinned his pessimistic contemplation of marriage and gender relations, the oppressive atmosphere of the play spread to society, and the tv version premiered as a sensation, when many people attributed the continued rise in the Nordic divorce rate to this.
Chinese version of "The Marriage Situation," directed by Guo Shixing, told me that the creation attracted him because after reading the script, he deeply understood one of the things that Bergman said through his lines: "In the matter of emotion, we are all illiterate." ”
Chinese version of "Marriage Situation", He Yufan (right) as John (courtesy of Gulou West Theater)
The story takes place between a model couple who appear on Women's Fashion World, and they hardly quarrel, as the line says, "Even if they quarrel, they rationally listen to what the other person says, and then reach a reasonable compromise."
The two protagonists, John and Marianne, are out-and-out middle-class Kochi families, and the relationship collapses because of the problem of children. They separated, divorced, remarried, and never found a perfect marriage. Years later, the two cheated on their then-partner and met again.
"The Marriage Situation" was written after Bergman's fourth failed marriage. Guo Shixing believes that the complexity of marriage stems from the complexity of human nature, and the failure of marriage will never be just a simple reason. "I think in modern society, marriage should have come to an end, just like the last bit of glory before the sunset is about to fall, very dazzling, but it is about to be extinguished." 」
Stills from The Most Perfect Divorce
In order to create this play, He shixing reread Engels's The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, which is based on Morgan's theory and begins to study backwards from the relationship between the sexes in primitive society. Engels's view is that, in essence, marriage arises for two reasons: one is for blood, and the other is that after the birth of private property, human property needs to be inherited. "Now, the change in the mode of production has completely shattered the structure of male and female weaving, modern production has dismembered the family, and it has become very difficult to preserve marriage."
In the view of Guo Shixing, although the times are changing, the problem of people's happiness has never been solved. "Today's young men and women have greater freedom of choice in marriage and love, but how much happiness can they get? It's still hard to predict. ”
Because the story involves the playwright's provocation of the traditional rules of gender relations, when creating "Marriage Situation", Guo Shixing always reminded the actors to pay attention to the psychological change process of the characters, and not to start from moral judgment. "I think marriage is a way of life, it depends on the way of production, and sometimes we tend to judge marriage from a moral dimension." 」
Stills from "Soybean Field And Three Ex-Husbands"
He mentioned that Sweden is an open society, and Nordic writers have long been thinking about gender relations in a complex human perspective. "Personal morality cannot save the situation of modern marriage, and there may still be people who sacrifice their will to maintain relationships, but many families are on the verge of collapse like in the play, which is a cruel reality that we must face." 」
Drama comes from moments when emotional lines are on the verge of breaking
Inevitably, actors often need to use specific life experience to empathize with real emotions to the characters, among which emotional dramas can find the most resonance.
Nemirovich-Danchenko, a theatrical giant who collaborated with Stanislavsky, proposed the concept of "image seed" from the Szczesian performance system. The director and actor study the script to form the outline of the performance, which in turn helps the actors find the feelings of the characters, their mental state, and the overall tone of the performance. Actor He Yufan analyzed to me his mental journey in the performance of the Chinese version of "Marriage Situation", and used image seeds to emphasize the importance of imagination.
In "Marriage Situation", one of the main contradictions between husband and wife is how to control finances, specific to the plot, that is, the debate about "how to spend money for children". He Yufan has no children, and he relies on his emotional experience of raising cats with his partner, which is actually similar. Sometimes cats get sick, it is expensive to see a doctor, and sitting in the clinic of a pet hospital, the crampedness of life will be particularly prominent. Cure is inevitable, but must cat litter be bought so well? Does cat food need so many tricks? These issues can sometimes cause quarrels. He puts the anxiety he has accumulated in the process of raising cats on John in the play.
There's a scene where John comes home ready for a showdown with Marianne, telling her that he's got a lover and wants a divorce. The problem for the actor to solve is how to make the audience feel the emotional change of the character from guilt to anger through the performance. John said in the play, "I hate it when I see you sitting at the table in the morning!" ”
When he said this very short line, He Yufan's mind had to come up with a very specific picture. "What kind of clothes is she wearing?" What kind of table are you sitting at? What food is on the plate? ...... Once in the role, when her hypocritical face appeared in my head, I would instinctively be angry. I'm sure the audience can see what I imagine too. ”
He Yufan believes that the actor's kung fu should be mainly spent on the imagination of details, and only details can produce feelings, because real life is superimposed from countless details. "The audience's evaluation of an actor's performance is inaccurate, in fact, the imaginary details are not in place."
His experience is that in the rehearsal hall, all the imaginary pictures must be fixed, and when performing, the stage will be like a mirror, instantly reflecting all the imaginary pictures in front of the audience. "If there is a line that says that an evening dress, although this is a very small detail, from beginning to end only this time in the line, the actor must also know clearly in his heart what this evening dress looks like." He Yufan said.
Stills from "Thirty Only"
Kong Yan, an experienced drama actor on stage, also mentioned the importance of imagination. "I'm skeptical about 'experiencing roles', today let me experience breakups, divorces, I can experience, but tomorrow I want to play suicide, drug use, what do I do?" 」 She mentions Vanessa Kirby, a brilliant British actress, "she's young, in her early thirties, and she's never experienced much of her life yet, but that doesn't stop her from acting because observing life is never as good as moving emotions."
In 2018, Kong Yan participated in the Chinese version of the play Breath by British playwright Duncan Macmillan. Macmillan's work mostly focuses on the theme of "anxiety", a duo play written when he was 29 years old, about a quarrel between a couple at home, the quarrel revolves around "whether to have children", Kong Yan plays the female doctor who loves to talk about big reasons.
Kong Yan starred in the Chinese version of the drama "Breath" (courtesy of TheVertebral Theatre, photo by Bao Yanzhou)
"Drama focuses on the process, not the result, the same quarrel, the intensity is similar, some characters break up, some do not. The results are often unimportant, and the drama comes from the moment when the emotional line is on the verge of breaking, the fierce game of complex emotions on both sides. Kong Yan said.
There is a joke circulating in theater circles: drama is to put the soul on the fire and roast it. This sentence is very graphic, the soul is like a piece of raw meat, after a short period of fire roasting, it becomes a mouthful of oil, and the torment in it can be imagined.
The dramatic scene is also good because the stage can eliminate the gap in time and make the intense emotional agitation instantly presented to the audience. Specific to the breakup, our memories are about the moment when the emotions reach their peak, when we have the same anger and heartbreak as the people in the play.
Stills from "I'll Be Better in the Next Life Season 2"
The famous musical "The Past Five Years" tells the story of a 5-year-long relationship between the male and female protagonists. An important reason for the success of the work is that in the play, the screenwriter writes the process from love to breakup from the perspective of the male protagonist, intertwines with this, and flashbacks from the perspective of the heroine to the experience from the breakup to the love. The audience looks at the stage, the sadness and happiness of 5 years are equal, although both of them are finally heartbroken by each other, but we are still happy for them because they have good memories.
In a way, drama is a time basket, and what the dramatist does is to pluck out the turbulent parts of the slow-flowing ordinary life and put them on the stage. No matter how long a life, no matter how dark the pain, can be spent in a few hours, which is also the inspiration it brings us.
In the theater of life, one day, we can put all the troubles brought about by love into the "fourth wall" and calmly watch from the perspective of the audience. As shakespeare, who was always optimistic, wrote in The Tempest with the spirit of the Renaissance: All this past is the prologue.
(This article is from the 7&8 love issue of Sanlian Digital Magazine in 2021)
(Excerpt from "Triptych Life Weekly" Anne / article)