Experimental play on historic CPC leader triggers dispute

A new play in memory of an early Communist Party of China (CPC) leader has sparked a controversy because of its experimental style.

The play "Qu Qiubai", performed at the Beijing People's Art Theatre from April 4 to 11, was named after the CPC leader who had rescued the Chinese agrarian revolution in the 1920s and ordered armed uprisings against the rule of the Kuomintang Party, before he was ousted by his political opponent Wang Ming.

The play tries to give a fair portrayal of Qu's contradictory personalities as a traditional Chinese intellectual and a revolutionary by showing his affection, love, friendship and his attitude to literature and politics.

Experts, however, have challenged the play, saying it fails to combine the expressive means of the Chinese traditional opera and those of modern drama and fails to give Qu depth of character, despite its bold and positive creativity.

Lin Kehuan, vice-president of the famous China Theater Art Studies Association, said that the playwright and director Hong Xiu failed to reproduce Qu's complex character and lacked understanding of the historical background.

Hong, of Beijing's elite Beijing Opera House, is renowned for her 2004 play, "Buddhist Hong Yi" in which she tried blending traditional Chinese opera and modern drama.

In "Qu Qiubai," she pioneers the incorporation of rhymed and dialectal lines, formalities, settings, and instruments -- including the vertical bamboo flute and hardwood clappers -- of traditional opera into modern drama performed by four actors of the traditional Chinese opera school.

With few plot lines, the play is composed of monologues by Qu and others, but the rhymed and dialectal lines are hard to understand for a contemporary audience.

"The rhythms of both performance and lighting are dull, and the characters played by one actor seem very similar," acknowledged Lin Yinyu, a celebrated director of the prestigious National Theatre Company of China.

Chinese artists have long attempted to merge traditional and modern performance.

"Wandering in the Garden, Waking from a Dream" written by Bai Xianyong, a renowned Chinese writer who settled in the United States, and directed by Huang Yigong in the 1980s, mingled traditional Beijing opera, Kunqu opera, movie and modern drama.

"It's a big, difficult task to modernize traditional opera, so where there is exploration and experiment, there is worth," Lin said.

Source: Xinhua