The dramas "Thunderstorm" and "After the Thunderstorm" were recently performed for three consecutive days at the Shanghai Grand Theatre, which has attracted much attention from the industry. In the more than 80 years since its inception, Cao Yu's "Thunderstorm" has staged countless versions. The script of "After the Thunderstorm" is written by Cao Yu's daughter and playwright Wan Fang. What is the connection between the two? What is the father like in the eyes of the daughter? Between performances, Wanfang made a guest lecture in the picture above, through the drama "Thunderstorm? After" and the interpretation of the long-form non-fiction work "You and Me", it is a soulful story of the father inside and outside the play.
Whether it is the literary world or the theater world, "Thunderstorm" is a work that is like thunder. The work was Cao Yu's debut novel, when he was only 23 years old, and once it came out, it shocked the world.
Due to his special status, Wanfang has been invited to see various versions of "Thunderstorm", including drama version, Huangmei opera version, Peking opera version, dance drama version, and even modern dance version. "There are a thousand Hamlets in the eyes of a thousand people, and there are also a thousand Cao Yu in the eyes of a thousand people!" After watching more, she found that everyone had their own understanding of "Thunderstorm". The original book of "Thunderstorm" has a prologue and an epilogue, in which only a pair of children and brothers and sisters talk about the two old people living in this big spooky house, but the prologue and epilogue are almost deleted in many performances. And it was the "prologue" and "epilogue" that made Wanfang have the idea of continuing "Thunderstorm": "Since there is a prologue and an epilogue, why can't there be a 'after the thunderstorm'?" ”
Wanfang's "After the Thunderstorm" is born from the "prologue" and "epilogue" of the original script of "Thunderstorm", telling the dialogue of Zhou Puyuan, FanYi and Shi Ping in the madhouse in the later years of "Thunderstorm", and this drama is also considered to be a spiritual dialogue between Cao Yu Wanfang's father and daughter.
In fact, before that, Wan Fang had also tried to enter the world of her father and mother with her works, which was her long non-fiction work "You and Me". Published in Harvest, No. 4, 2019, the work uses "I" as the perspective to sort out and reproduce the lives, emotional processes and tortuous life fates of the fathers in the vast historical memory.
Wan Fang revealed that he had been brewing for ten years before he decided to write "You and Me". In this work, she talks openly about her parents' love for the first time, and the book is accompanied by love letters and photos of her parents.
In the book, Wan Fang restores his father to a real person, so that readers can understand Cao Yu more comprehensively and three-dimensionally. People found that under the aura of "Chinese Shakespeare", Cao Yu was actually a living person who could cry and laugh, and he also had shortcomings. What also makes Wan Fang quite emotional is that there is no man in the world who loves women more than his father. Perhaps because she was born without a mother, Cao Yu always has a unique compassion for women, and it is precisely because of this love that she has a strong female role: Fanyi, Chen Bailu, Yu Fang...
Author: Li Ting
Editor: Xu Luming