After 17 years, Ren Yi rearranges "Lover"
◎Kurishin
In 1992, the Shanghai Youth Repertory Theatre staged Harold Pinter's play Lover. This is not the first performance of "Lover" in China, but it has caused a lot of shock in the Chinese drama scene. This version of "Lover" has been performed 45 times in Shanghai and more than 300 times across the country, and such a hot market response is quite a commercial success even today. Pinter himself was puzzled by this, not understanding why Chinese audiences thousands of miles away would be so interested in the marriage and sex of middle-class couples in the suburbs of England.
In fact, in the early 1990s, the traditional conservative concept of sex in Chinese society was challenged, and people began to reflect on the suppression and concealment of internal desires, and the title of "lover" alone and the commercial gimmick of "inappropriate for minors" were enough to attract the attention of a large number of viewers. The scenery of "Lover" infinitely reflects the market environment of the society at that time and the mental state of people, and some foreign media regard it as a signal of change in China's social life.
The curious look at "Lover" is of course a product of a specific historical period, and when Beijing Renyi rehearsed "Lover" in 2004, people shifted more attention from the appearance of "pornography" to the deep meaning behind the "lover's game". After 17 years, director Xu Ang rearranged the old works, and the focus of his interpretation of Pinte has changed somewhat. These changes are not only related to Xu Ang's own artistic interests, but also reflect the new changes in social life and ideological concepts to some extent.
A two-identity game for a couple
"Lover" begins with husband Richard asking his wife Sarah if she will meet her lover today. The couple did not talk about this matter in the slightest, as if meeting a lover was as ordinary as eating and going to work. As the plot progresses, Pint reveals the secret, and it turns out that Sarah's lover is Richard's disguised Max, and the so-called lover's rendezvous is actually a lover-playing game.
Pint's style of play is known for being difficult to distinguish between true and false, unpredictable and unpredictable, and the plot of the play can often be interpreted openly. "There is no clear distinction between the real and the imaginary, and there is no distinction between the real and the false. A thing does not necessarily mean that it is not true or false; it can be both true and false. This quote from Pinte is still on the homepage of Pinte's official website.
As for "Lover", there are completely different ways of understanding not only in some details, but also in terms of the main plot of the whole play. Perhaps, richard and Sarah, as they say, have maintained for a long time the past as a lover of each other; but it is also possible that they have only just begun to pretend to be lovers, and that the past they are talking about is only a verbal game of discourse construction. Perhaps, as Richard and Sarah show us, they escape the daily life of the middle class as Max and the prostitutes; but another possibility exists: max and the prostitutes who steal love are their true selves, and the serious Richard and Sarah are the disguised appearances.
However, no matter how it is understood, one thing is certain - the opposition between the two lifestyles and living conditions is the most basic plot structure of "Lover". The first is a couple, well-behaved and decent, yet rigid and boring. This is the modern life of capitalism shrouded in the rule of instrumental reason, which is lifeless, and Weber calls it an "iron cage". There is no such thrill and freedom that a lover's second life can provide. Sexual desire, as the basis of the lover's life, is both a rebellious force, with the "pleasure principle" against the "reality principle" (Freudian), but also a way of redemption, helping people to get rid of the shackles of the "iron cage" and restore their authentic state.
Lovers or husbands and wives, more and more confused
The understanding and cognition of these two lives largely determines the appearance of the stage of "Lover". In the Renyi 04 edition of "Lover", the cracks under the appearance of the couple's peaceful life are highlighted. When Richard asks sarah about her meeting with her lover, Sarah's reply is always a bit prickly. When Sarah points out that Richard has also gone to find his mistress, her tone is even more aggressive. But in renyi's new version of "Lover", the conversation between the two is handled more plainly and more daily. When Sarah breaks Richard's afternoon with his mistress, there is no fierceness to catch the other party's flaws, but a cunning that has the upper hand in the game.
This is not a by-product of the shift in Chinese drama performance style to life over the past decade or so, but rather the creators' intentions. As another example, the first night Richard came home and asked Sarah how she was doing in the afternoon, and in the 04 version, Sarah replied, "That's still needed to say, very happy", and "hummed" before speaking, revealing a hint of mockery and disdain for Richard; in the new version, Sarah replied "Of course, absolutely", completely immersed in the memories of the wonderful afternoon (the line feature here is "Oh yes." Quite marvelous.” ）。 In the new version of "Lover", both Richard and Sarah are more accustomed to mentioning everything related to the lover, and their tension and emotional crisis are hidden in the quiet communication.
The new version of "Lover" is not as wild as the 04 version of the lover's life. In Pinter's pen, the African drum is an important image, an invasion from outside the modern civilization of the bourgeoisie, marking the transition from the world of husband and wife to the world of lovers, symbolizing the primitive desires and destructive impulses of the lover's world. However, in the new version of "Lover", the African drum is not fully utilized, and its role is greatly weakened. Throughout, we didn't hear the powerful drumming sound. Pinter details how Sarah and Richard's fingers teased each other on the drums, a ritualistic beginning of the Lover's game, but this scene is not restored to the stage of the new version of Lover.
The ending set by Pinte for "Lover" is that the world of husband and wife and the world of lovers are unsustainable, but it is not a secret secret love to surrender to conventional ethics, but a replacement for the lover relationship after the erosion of the husband and wife relationship. The 04 version of "Lover" makes it not difficult for us to identify the logical process of the bankruptcy of the lover's game - the short-term lover playing is increasingly unsatisfied, and to meet the needs, it is necessary to turn the occasional into regular, and the short-lived into permanent. At the beginning of "Lover", Richard and Sarah's original husband and wife world is already in ruins, Richard shows fatigue when playing Max, and their efforts to maintain the two tracks of life in parallel will naturally be a bamboo basket to draw water. But in the new version of "Lover", such an explanation is not convincing enough, because the lover's life has not yet unleashed its destructive power to the maximum. Although lovers' lives and conjugal lives are still facing each other, the difference between the two has become smaller. It became increasingly unclear whether the two men in front of us were Richard and Sarah, or Max and the prostitute.
The "lover's game" is not valid today
The 04 version of "Lover" is Xu Ang's first independent directing work in Beijing Renyi. Now that the show is rearranged, he has been in the film and television industry for several years. In an interview, he said that he deliberately borrowed some experience in film and television creation, with the intention of creating a private living atmosphere and the audience's peeping sense of this life. Therefore, this version of "Lover" all uses the light source of life, the audience can not see the actor's expression at all times, the actor is mainly whispering most of the time; do not care about the actor's backstage, the couch on the stage is facing the audience, and this sofa is the place where many conversations take place. This can explain the above differences between the old and new Lovers to some extent: on the one hand, the pursuit of privacy and voyeurism limits the wanton and crazy sexual fantasy game; on the other hand, in the relationship between voyeurism and being spied on, the duality of conjugal life as a whole becomes a secret that needs to be kept, and the difference between the two lives becomes relatively secondary.
In my opinion, the shift in the artistic taste of the creator may unconsciously reflect the change of the times in the acceptance and understanding of "Lover". "Lover" rebels against the moral code and strict order of modern life with forbidden lust and sex, but does this rebellion work? Pinter's attitude is worth playing. He probably has a hint of skepticism about this, and through the grotesque fantasy of devouring reality at the end of "Lover", we seem to hear a laugh from Pint.
Since the Enlightenment, rationalization, instrumentalization, and stratification have spread to all spheres of capitalist social life, and the unified norms and overall domination of reason have become a kind of "violence", and the Frankfurt School claims that "the world of complete enlightenment is shrouded in a catastrophe caused by victory". But at the same time, Enlightenment modernity is constantly brewing to generate reflection and criticism of itself. We can enumerate a list of thinkers and the antagonistic approaches they have proposed out of different epochal contexts and theoretical tendencies.
In the 1960s, when The Lover was born (the TV series "The Lover" aired on March 28, 1963, and "The Lover" and "Dwarf" were staged together at the London Arts Theatre Club on September 18 of the same year), the postmodern avant-garde, marked by sexual liberation and physical indulgence, launched a new powerful attack on modern rational principles. However, this impulse to provoke and break with has gradually faded in the postmodern embrace of consumerism and openness to everyday life. Today, the repression of subverting everyday life with the freedom of sex games is almost impossible to succeed, because personality and mechanics, abnormality and mainstream, authenticity and alienation have long been mixed together, infiltrating each other, and it is difficult to distinguish between you and me. Whether they were Richard and Sarah or Max and the prostitute, the clear demarcation between the world of lovers and the world of couples was gone before the game began.
If the story of Lover continues after the curtain falls, I tend to speculate about the fate of the people in the play in this day and age: they will switch between the two identities over and over again, perhaps reaching a new stability, but it will also be a new dilemma — as the Sarah/Prostitute near the end of the play lines "I am trapped" and "I can't get out" suggest. We are still constantly looking for an outlet for our predicament, and as we work on it, we will understand the meaning of pint even more.
Photo / Reporter Wang Xiaoxi