MCLC: Returning Home on a Snowy Night

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Returning Home on a Snowy Night
***********************************************************

Source: China Daily (12/12/21):
http://europe.chinadaily.com.cn/culture/2012-12/21/content_16038155.htm

Stellar cast shines, but play needs a little adventure
By Raymond Zhou (China Daily)

It must have looked like an escape from reality when Wu Zuguang wrote and
first presented Returning Home on a Snowy Night in 1942. Fires of war were
engulfing China, yet not a hint of either the Japanese invasion or Chinese
resistance could be detected in the play. This was in the wartime city of
Chongqing, where many of the nation's glitterati had found refuge, in
contrast to Japanese-occupied Shanghai, where Chinese filmmakers injected
innocuous entertainment with somber overtones and subtle allusions to the
woes of foreign occupation.

However, the story of a Peking Opera star in love with the concubine of an
official not only survived, but has turned into a classic with increasing
relevance. The craze for pop sensation and the hypocrisy of officialdom
have never been truer today even though the romance at the heart of the
story is so starry-eyed it borders on unbelievable. Well, it serves well
as an antidote of eerie idealism at least.

The new production by the National Center for the Performing Arts stands
out for its stellar cast, among other things.

Feng Yuanzheng, a pillar of versatility and subtlety on the Chinese stage,
plays the official, or chief justice, to be specific, who has the
sophisticated taste of an opera patron and the ambiguous sexuality of
having four wives while chasing a female impersonator.

Feng does not go the cheap way of caricature, but imbues the character
with complexity. The last scene in which he, as a newly devout Buddhist,
sends his butler to bury the homeless person found frozen to death in his
ornate yard, without realizing it was the star he once adored and then
expelled from the city, has true pathos. The hypocrisy, if it can be so
called, is ingrained so deeply in our psyche that it is nothing like that
seen in a typical melodrama.

The big surprise is Yu Shaoqun, who plays the 25-year-old opera star who
grows up in a humble family and still retains his innocence and sense of
justice.

Yu, who gained fame by playing the young Mei Lanfang in Chen Kaige's 2009
biopic Forever Enthralled, looks stunning in full Peking Opera regalia.

With opera training from a young age, though not Peking Opera and not in
female roles, he pulls off the opening scene of the character on stage
with strong credibility. The fantasy scene that closes the play, where he
does a dance with the older self's corpse in the foreground, again in
female garb, elevates the tale of love to a higher plane.

In contrast with these leading performances, two supporting roles provide
comic relief as well as the uglier side of humanity.

The butler who latches onto the next powerful person and sells out those
who have helped him seem like a reincarnation of Monsieur Thenardier from
Les Miserables, born into a Beijing household.

The student who gives up everything to hover around the star, ingratiating
himself into his circle and believing himself to be an indispensable part
of the star ecosystem, is the predecessor of the modern lunatic whose
dream is becoming a groupie. There are no sexual innuendos but he is dumb
but hilarious.

The set, designed by Xue Dianjie, is traditional in the sense it does not
impede the drama nor enhance it. It is much lower key than NCPA's two
previous productions of straight plays. Both Jane Eyre and Wangfujing
featured fluid or elaborate sets that made full use of the
state-of-the-art stagecraft.

Unlike its opera productions, NCPA's plays run into stiff competition as
the city also has the Beijing People's Art Theater, a bastion of repertory
plays, among several theaters and dozens of small ones with more
avant-garde offerings, not to mention the touring productions from
Taiwan's Stan Lai, which sweeps the mainland like a force of nature.

NCPA hews to the tried-and-true with both mainstream aesthetics and
commercial appeal in mind. In that sense, it is positioning itself as an
haute version of the Beijing People's Art Theater, with several cast
members borrowed from that institution for Returning Home on a Snowy Night.

To broaden its lineup for a regular season like that of its operas, it
needs to build on its strength by kicking in something more adventurous
and wider-ranging in programming.

Contact the writer at raymondzhou at chinadaily.com.cn