"Huansha" "Twelfth Night": a comedy performance on gender issues

Stills from Twelfth Night

Lai Di

For Shakespeare, nothing speaks more about the richness of his creation and his influence on future generations than the phrase "after Shakespeare, everything is a mishmash." Shakespeare's Globe Theatre's tour of "The Comedy of Error" and "Twelfth Night" allows us to see the mastery of the comedic skills of the playwright Shakespeare, and at the same time regain the charm of Shakespeare as an actor and troupe manager: what is the script written for the "performance", what is the comedy creation for the theater and the audience.

"Twelfth Night" has a unique significance in Shakespeare's comedy works, it is evaluated as mature because it synthesizes Shakespeare's previous comedy techniques, and because of the shaping of the character in the play, as well as the setting of the character of "Mavolio", it is regarded as more than simply making the audience laugh, and it is a "comedy that bids farewell to entertainment and cheerfulness". In Twelfth Night, the twin siblings (Viola and Sibasin) arrive in Illyria separately due to shipwrecks. Viola, alias Hissario, dressed as a man and became a squire of the Duke of Osino, while helping him to court Olivia, but Olivia fell in love with the good-looking squire at first sight, and Viola fell in love with the Duke of Osino. By coincidence, Olivia and Sibasin, Viola and Ossino each followed their wishes and eventually became a family.

The comedic section of the twins' "identity misunderstanding", coupled with the transvestite plot, makes the coincidences and misunderstandings in this work diverse and flexible. The elizabethan custom of female characters played by boys on the stage made the actors who were originally men dressed as women in the work need to perform their original gender in most occasions in the play. This not only allows the works to show a multi-layered performance space, but also contains rich gender issues.

In Tim Carroll's "Twelfth Night", the charm of the all-male class performance is based on the maximum restoration of the transvestite charm in the play. In particular, Mark Rylance, who plays Olivia, and Paul Chahidi, who plays the maid Maria (Olivia's maid), do not deliberately suppress their masculine identity, while performing a unique feminine flavor. Whether it is a transgender performance or a "twin" on the stage, there is no need to pursue similar appearance, which makes the audience realize that the actor is "performing", which is an important charm of the Shakespeare era theater.

We cannot find definitive evidence of what kind of performance style Shakespeare and his "Palace Minister's Troupe" presented in the Elizabethan era. But it is certain that Shakespeare found a breakthrough in how to express the inner heart of the character and thus distinguish it from the traditional performance of "contrivance". He inherits the effective performance programs and actions in "Drama Fake", and at the same time, in "Love Truth", the audience can see more of the character's heart and emotions. Just like in "Twelfth Night", the male actors' transvestite performances will certainly make the audience laugh, but when they show their inner entanglements in the play, or bravely express love, they are extremely sincere and moving.

"Twelfth Night" brought by "Huansha", although it is a copy of the characteristics of the London Theatre and the Elizabethan performance in the stage and performance procedures, it does not adopt an all-male class performance, but through the way of men dressing as women, women playing men, and exchanging gender performances, "transvestite" has become a mobile existence on the stage. It is not difficult to find that the two works of "The Comedy of Errors" and "Twelfth Night" are performed by the same group of actors (nine). The same actor plays different genders and role types in different works, which requires actors to have clear judgment and concise performance of the object they play. Therefore, we saw a large number of improvisational comedy techniques and programs in the actors of "Huansha", which made the performance rhythm bright and clear and easy to understand, so that the audience could quickly understand the actor's actions and physical expressions, and actively interact with the stage emotionally.

However, from the objective effect, the performance of "Huansha" actually allows us to see more possibilities for gender performances in "Twelfth Night" and the current dialogue. Transgender performances create a natural comedic effect, not to mention that Shakespeare's comedy creation has a clear "pleasing" audience color. Whether it's the male-female interchange of "Huansha" or the all-male class in Tim Carroll's version, they all have the same comedic tension.

In a TED talk titled "Ballroom Dancing That Breaks The Gender Definition," Trevor Copp and Jeff Fox talk about what gender transition means today through ballroom dancing. By creating a "mobile lead" approach, they changed the classical Latin and ballroom dance norm of "male leadership and female following their dance" to a form in which any gender can take turns leading the dance. The two stressed that gender swapping is actually a change in mindset. The "mobile lead dance" can remove this gender limitation that does not belong to us, and make the interpretation of ballroom dance closer to the way of thinking of contemporary people.

In Shakespeare's comedies, we can all find countless interesting examples of what Judith Butler calls "gender is performative," yet for today's audiences, these "gender performances" could have had more conversations about mindsets. Whether it is a man dressed as a woman to interpret the ideal woman in his heart, or a woman dressed as a man to create a perfect man in the heart of a woman, the charm of gender performance lies in allowing the audience to see the stereotypes of different genders in society in an exaggerated and distant way, and thus find what they really want to be.

Through "Twelfth Night", "Huansha" in a modern theater strives to create and restore the Elizabethan way when there is no sound and light, the actors perform a wonderful comedy through their limbs and movements as the audience. Judging from the live effect, For the expectation and psychology of modern audience laughter, Shakespeare's comedy is not outdated. However, we return to Shakespeare not to stay, but to find his creation and the dialogue with the present, and to constantly discover new possibilities. The twelfth night stage makes the gender performance appear more free and fluid, which is actually a good start.

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