The Paper's reporter Pan Yu
In 2017, the premiere of the drama "Alcoholic Mo Fei", directed by Polish drama master Christian Lupa and starring Wang Xuebing, brought a topic work that aroused great concern to the drama world that year. After five years, the producer of "Alcoholics Mo Fei" drove media to start the re-rehearsal of the play again, this time the "European tour version" was modified and condensed on the basis of the initial version, and the duration was slightly compressed. On February 12 and 13, the play was staged at the Shanghai Grand Theatre, which is the third time that the work has come to Shanghai, and will also start the 2022 tour of the play.
The re-typeset version of "Alcoholic Mo Fei" is still starring Wang Xuebing, Li Longyin, Zhang Jiahuai, Li Qiuchen, etc. It is worth mentioning that Wang Xuebing's son Dida played a little Mo in the drama this time, and it is also the childhood Mo Fei, which is also the first time that father and son have performed on the same stage. Lu Pa, a director who is far away in Europe, is still thinking about the rearrangement of this drama every day through video connection, and puts forward various opinions and plans.
Stills of "Alcoholics Can't Be", Wang Xuebing's father and son entered Lu Pa's world together for the first time on the same stage
A spiritual visit by a Polish director to a Chinese writer, a drama set in a film
Adapted from Shi Tiesheng's work "The Idea of a Drama Set in a Movie", the drama "Alcoholic Mo Fei" tells the story of Mo Fei, an alcoholic who was found dead for seven days, who walked between reality and illusion, past and future, downstream from the urge of alcohol.
The play is also one of the "Chinese Story Trilogy" by Polish director Christian Lupa, known as the "Giant of European Theatre". As a national treasure director in the Polish theater industry, Lupa is no longer unfamiliar to many Chinese audiences, before, his "Masquerade Marilyn", "Logging" and "Heroes' Square" have all come to China, and the recent "Diary of a Madman" has aroused widespread discussion. Created five years ago, "Alcoholics Mo Fei" is Lu Pa's first time to come to China to create a work, which is Lu Pa's spiritual visit to the Chinese writer Shi Tiesheng in the air but with the same frequency, and it is also an exploration of "telling Chinese stories in the vocabulary of world drama".
Stills from "The Alcoholic."
"The Alcoholic" continues the consistent aesthetic and style of Lu Pa's works, but it is also based on Shi TieSheng's vision of the work. The background of the entire stage is the movie screen, and the actor is a drunkard who sleepwalks on the stage. With the help of alcohol, you can go back to the past: see yourself born in the false marriage of your parents; talk to your innocent childhood self, warn the desire that has not yet grown up, don't do anything shameful; touch the hand of your ex-wife who has been divorced and run away...
"We made a screen on stage as a backdrop to show the story of the movie, but what was presented in the film was the real thoughts of the protagonist's heart, so that his life became a movie. This kind of thinking and setting actually has a very strong philosophical meaning. The first time I read Stetson's original work, I conceived of the role of an alcoholic, hoping to express some unspeakable emotions in everyday life through such a person. Lupa once explained that the work formally combined film and drama into one.
In this rehearsal, Li Longyin, a performance artist who plays an old policeman, once again relived Lu Pa's creative ideas. In Lu Pa's eyes, the plot on the screen of the movie on the stage and the real performance of the actors confirm the real-life interaction between people: you can talk, you can get close, but you can never really enter each other's world. I think this idea is very "dragging", if we can understand Lu Pa's meaning, carefully think about what these actors on the stage really want to express, it is also considered that we are not in vain 'tortured' by Lu Pa."
For the first time, Wang Xuebing's father and son shared the stage and interpreted the philosophy from "Mo" to "Mo Fei"
In the drama "Alcoholic Mo Fei", Wang Xuebing starred in Mo Fei, and he used a dream-like monologue in the play. The restrained but energetic performance contributes to an extremely amazing stage state, and also achieves a certain transcendence and "nirvana" in his personal performance. As he looks back on what the show has brought him five years later, he says, "Maybe I don't feel intimidated about 'staying' on stage anymore." ”
Stills from The Alcoholics (old version).
In the play, Wang Xuebing plays a social "marginal person", a loser in the eyes of others, an incurable incompetent drunkard who abandons himself. He did not identify with the existing order of the world and wanted to remove the "emperor's new clothes", so he put himself in the position of a rebel, wanted to "lock himself in a closed and opaque hexahedron" - so that only with the help of alcohol could he temporarily forget everything. Wang Xuebing used a unique performance state to reveal the truth of contemporary loneliness, which also won various awards including the "Best Actor" at the 2nd Chinese Drama Festival in 2018.
For this work, including director Lu Pa, Wang Xuebing said that he understood a lot in the process of creating and rehearsing: "I think that what kind of acting, kung fu, skills are secondary and can be practiced, but the things in your heart do not need to be deliberately modified." Lupa's mental method taught me how to communicate with the audience, how to stay on the stage naturally when I am not talking, and let me have real thinking on the stage, rather than mechanically memorizing the rehearsed lines on the stage. ”
Wang Xuebing's father and son were interviewed together at the Shanghai Grand Theatre
In the original book, the protagonist A imagines talking to himself as a child, his name was B when he was a child, and when he grew up, he changed his name to A. Everyone has two sides of AB, and in the drama "Alcoholic Mo Fei", Lu Pa named the childhood protagonist "Mo", and added the word "non" when he grew up, named "Mo Fei". This year's rehearsal, the little Mofei of that year needed to change actors because he was too old, and the crew felt that Wang Xuebing's son Dida just happened to be age-appropriate. Because he has a unique feeling for this drama, after several entanglements, Wang Xuebing still agreed to complete this work with his son on the same stage.
Wang Xuebing said, "At first, I did hesitate, I felt that this script is still a little difficult for a child of this age, but also to let him accept a 'drunk' father." But when I finished talking to him about this work, I found that he could have his own understanding and insight into this work. ”
Dida
And 8-year-old Dida, although lively and active, but the analysis of his own character, is very similar, sometimes serious and serious to make everyone laugh. He understands his role this way: "When people grow up, they can't go back to the past, but I found (in the play) that as long as people finish drinking, they can go to the future or go back to the past, and the role I played is Mo Fei when he was a child, and he wants to go back to his childhood, so he drank wine, went back to the past, and saw me." ”
Asked, "If you met your former self, what would you like to say to yourself?" Dida said: "Xiao Mofei must be more naughty and naïve than middle-aged Mofei, I think I will definitely reason with him, but I will not clearly tell him 'you will definitely become like me in the future'" After saying that, he thought about it and added: "I think ah, in fact, life does not have to go to the point of drinking." ”
Editor-in-Charge: Zhang Zhe
Proofreader: Zhang Liangliang