Pu drama "Oedipus King"
Although it is still in the midst of a global immersive and continuous fight against the epidemic, Shanghai has successfully held the annual "China Small Theater Opera Exhibition" as scheduled. The circle of friends participating in the drama is expanding, and the Pu opera and Han opera with a history of 400 years have also appeared on the stage of small theater opera for the first time this year, bringing surprises to the audience in Shanghai with its rich cultural heritage and bold and innovative modern consciousness. The vicissitudes of ancient wood and the new green are gratifying, and the outstanding impression of this exhibition and performance is precisely the innovative concept embodied in the exploration of small theater opera by several dramas with heavy historical accumulation.
The Peking opera "The Death of a Small Official" from Chekhov's short story "The Death of a Small Civil Servant" found his mixed officialdom, because of a sneeze and panic all day long, until the absurd taste of sudden death of panic, he applied a "sinicized" change of face to the work and made it into a small theater opera. The play gives full play to the means of expression of peking opera art, the whole play has only one actor, suddenly the unlucky Jiupinguan, and suddenly the narrator of the story, not only with the ugly work of the small officials, but also with the "Yanpai" old student singing the patrol's elegance, with the "Ye Pai" Xiaosheng singing the anger of the county grandfather. This kind of one-person multi-angle and jump-in-and-out ridicule skillfully integrates the freehand virtual and small theater opera pioneer experiments of Chinese opera aesthetics, and tells the world story without leaving its parcel.
The Pu opera "Oedipal King" seamlessly connects the high-pitched excitement of Shanxi Zizi with the heavy sadness of Greek tragedy, giving us a surprise. The minimalist cast is a layered representation of Odi's fate. The sinicization of Greek mythology, transformed without trace, highlights the local characteristics. Large passages such as "Knowing that a life curse is difficult to break, why should we work hard to escape" not only translate the song team narrative and character dialogue in the Greek text, but also rich in Chinese cultural rhyme. What surprised me even more was that when I recounted the past, two Oedipus also appeared on the stage of the ancient Pu opera, revealing the inner fission with the two selves of the characters. In this psychologically externalized virtual space, at the same time, the real queen appears, which concisely and profoundly reveals the inner struggles of the characters. Although I feel sorry that the play did not set up a whole series of characters, and I feel a little sorry that it did not strengthen Oedip's belief in the destiny of fate to reflect a kind of personality strength, but the bold creativity of Pu Opera is really exciting.
If the above two plays tell the story of the world in Chinese Chinese, then "Bai Luo Shirt" and "Goodbye Zhuo Wenjun" interpret the historical story in contemporary terms. I remember that last year's "Grass Bridge Dream" was based on the depressed Zhang Sheng sleepwalking and floating, with the love of the fiery "past tense" and the cold and miserable "present tense" intertext, the plot of "West Chamber". Today's condensed version of "Bai Luo Shirt" focuses on the psychological torment of the newly promoted official Xu Jizu in the face of how to deal with his father who is both a murderer of his father and an adoptive father who has raised him for 18 years. The young creative team of the Shanghai KunQu Troupe deleted the original work and simplified it, using flashbacks and interludes to outline Xu Jizu's reading paper, encountering an old woman who drew water from the well, and learning the truth about his own life from the mouth of the milk gong, and then grasped the core of the play and re-created the "trial father" fold. This scene is a trial of the "adoptive father" and an examination of his own soul, not only the trial of the father killer, but also the trial of the "one scale" in his heart! At the end of the curtain, the painting style changed, under the sensationalism of the composer and conductor, the people in the play walked out of history, one by one from the audience to the stage, they changed the life and death feud in the plot, twisted their bodies, sang popular music, and even Xu Jizu, who was "a law enforcement pen, with blood in his heart", also sang a play song with a raw voice at this time. The audience in the audience boiled, which gave them an emotional relief and found empathy with the people in the play in the contemporary vocabulary.
Chinese drama "Goodbye Zhuo Wenjun"
The Chinese drama "Goodbye Zhuo Wenjun" is a witty and relaxed absurd comedy. The parallel unfolding of the love stories of the two eras and the interconnection of the characters' "crossing" are the main structures of the play. Two "third parties" of different eras have been busy through the ages in exchange for money for love... The plot is absurd, but it reflects the common concept of love between ancient and modern times. Although the feelings of the two groups of couples have bumped and bumped, "no matter how ancient and modern, the true feelings can not be separated lightly." This kind of "crossing" is a very familiar vocabulary for young people in the era of e-sports and online games, and the two "local tycoons" in ancient and modern times are actually the symbols of "capital". Although the performance is more straightforward, it is also quite interesting. It is gratifying that a drama with a long history can still show such a youthful state.
The exploration of small theater opera has gone through seven years, which is seven years of successful climbing and seven years of arduous trekking. Overall, I am still a little dissatisfied with the works in this exhibition, and there are still many topics worth discussing and practicing. To adhere to the original intention of "the pioneering nature of the concept and the experimental nature of art", and to measure it by the standard of "learning from the ancients and not violating the law", we look forward to more new breakthroughs in the exploration of small theater opera.
Author: Li Shoucheng (Theatre Critic)
Editor: Wang Xiaoli
Editor-in-Charge: Liu Qing
*Wenhui exclusive manuscript, please indicate the source when reprinting.