Zhu’s precious one-volume copy of Shakespeare was now under lock and key, but the view from his study was intact, over a quiet courtyard of trees, their leaves a vibrant green. Pretending to investigate his torn copies of The Merry Wives of Windsor, an American import, and Thomas Hardy, I listened to the sighing of the leaves and the spatter of the rain. The title of the Hardy was Life’s Little Ironies.
After a ceremonious and drawn-out lunch in a local restaurant, we were driven to Jiaxing’s central library, where a group of white-gloved female archivists were hovering in an upstairs room. Warily they pulled out a number of small parcels, wrapped in white paper and tied with ribbons like gifts. Inside were exercise books bound with brown parcel paper. Zhu Shanggang carefully teased one open: The Tempest, the first play his father had translated. The yellowing pages were as thin as tracing paper.
Ben Jonson famously claimed of Shakespeare that ‘the players have often mentioned it as an honour … that in his writing (whatsoever he penned), he never blotted out a line’. Zhu really did seem to have barely blotted a line, particularly as his translations progressed – page after page filled with neat rivulets of text in a quick, precise hand.
The Mandarin I had no grasp of, but it was impossible not to admire the density of the work. Dark black characters were scribbled right into the spines of the books, crowding the sides and spilling on to the scrap paper that had been used to bind them. The homemade cover of Romeo and Juliet was a page cut from an English-language Shanghai newspaper, including a gory story about a sixteen-year-old apprentice murdering his master with a ‘large butcher’s knife’ in the German Concession.
I had arrived in Jiaxing sceptical about the claim that Zhu had really translated thirty-one plays in less than two years, but this part of the story seemed to be absolutely true: there was barely time, or paper, for anything else. Thirty-one plays in twenty months – a play every two and a half weeks. Liang Shiqiu’s translation, the one Penguin China had their eye on, had taken its author thirty-eight years. By any standards, not only those of a man succumbing to TB, Zhu’s was an awesome achievement.
This wasn’t to say it was perfect. It was a delicate fact that, while not quite blotted with errors, Zhu’s translations – done with a tiny handful of reference books – were creative, and sometimes plain wrong. A few days earlier yet another translator, Yiqun Wang, had taken me line by line through different versions of Julius Caesar and Coriolanus, sorrowfully pointing out places where Zhu had either ignored the primary sense of Shakespeare’s lines or apparently misconstrued them, mistaking words and sometimes entire concepts.
I raised the issue as gently as I could. Zhu Shanggang looked unruffled. ‘His only resources were an Oxford English dictionary, a Chinese–English dictionary and Shakespeare’s original works. In a letter to my mother, he said he thought about looking at Liang Shiqiu’s translations as a point of reference, but found it difficult for him to move on with his own; so from that point on, he was determined not to refer to others’ translations.’
How had his father’s work survived the Cultural Revolution, when so much else relating to western literature and culture had perished?
His mother had been working as a teacher, he explained; teachers had been especially vulnerable, and despite the fact that she was then in her fifties, she had been sent to do manual labour. In one of the myriad petty cruelties of the system, she had been reassigned as a cleaner in the very school where she had taught.
Zhu smiled, but his eyes were elsewhere. ‘They said the school toilets had never been so clean. But she kept the manuscripts safe in Jiaxing, even though they confiscated the revisions she had made.’
If the government had known she had all these originals, they would have destroyed them too?
‘Of course.’
Since then, there had been yet another switchback turn in ideological direction. Shakespeare was now deemed a symbol of openness and internationalism; it was declared that China should revere both him and Zhu Shenghao. A lavish multiple-volume facsimile edition of the manuscripts had recently been published. And the previous VIP to have come to Jiaxing to look at these pages was none other than Wen Jiabao. He had made the trip soon after returning from his jaunt to Stratford-upon-Avon, presumably eager to see how China had served a writer who ‘must be read up to a hundred times to be fully understood’.
How did it make Zhu Shanggang feel, that the same Communist Party that had once tried to annihilate everything his father achieved now honoured him as a hero?
Zhu Shanggang smiled wanly. ‘People are different now from back then.’
Before I came to China, I asked a Chinese academic who now teaches in Britain whether I would get anywhere by asking people about the Cultural Revolution. The phone line had gone quiet.
‘Honestly, I am not sure,’ she said at last. ‘The subject is still so personal, often painful. You will need to be cautious.’
The opposite had happened. Almost without my trying, stories about the awfulness of those years had tumbled out – the Beijing theatre director in his fifties who remembered watching his jingju actor father being paraded in humiliation through their town in full make-up and costume; the Guardian colleague who told me about interviewing a man who, as a zealous teenager, had testified against his own mother, testimony that meant she’d been shot.
The day after getting back from Jiaxing I had lunch with yet another theatre director, who, in the middle of a conversation about an Othello she had done in the 1990s, said she’d chosen the play because the hero’s alienation from society echoed her own feelings about her wild-eyed contemporaries clutching their little red books.
Nearly forty years had passed since the end of the Cultural Revolution, and as China had cautiously opened up, a more confessional culture had crept in, albeit firmly one-sided in its revelations (while it was hard to talk about your family being persecuted, it was infinitely harder to admit that you or your relations had been complicit). On the mainland, books, films, TV shows and articles on the subject were still carefully censored, but outside its borders, from Jung Chang’s Wild Swans on, memoirs and fiction itemising the horrors of China’s lost decade had become a publishing sensation. Even in China there were reports that increasing numbers of people were seeking psychotherapy (itself banned under Mao), trying to lay the ghosts of the recent past.
The Party remained uneasy about open debate, but a cynic could see the political advantage of allowing certain carefully edited snapshots to make their way into the public domain. It struck me as not dissimilar from the impulse behind the propagandistic Elizabethan chroniclers Halle and Holinshed, filleted by Shakespeare for his histories, as they reflected on the carnage that tore Britain apart in the Middle Ages: See how we are different, how our country is better. Do not endanger this. Perhaps the Cultural Revolution was China’s equivalent of the Tudor Myth, by which Elizabethans attempted to convince themselves that they would never again return to a country so fractiously divided as during the Wars of the Roses.
Digging in the archives at the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre one morning, I came across a photograph. It was in black-and-white, of a man leaning against a woman next to an arched doorway, vaguely Italianate. His left arm rested casually above her head, his knee grazing hers; a flirtatious gesture, perhaps a touch protective. Her smile seemed genuinely warm. Both wore Elizabethan garb. One had to peer closely to see they were Chinese: he was wearing an elaborately shaggy wig and what appeared to be a false nose; her make-up had been so thickly applied that her face looked as flour-white as the organza shawl around her shoulders.
I checked with the archivist: it was a production of Much Ado About Nothing from 1979 staged here in Shanghai. The couple were Beatrice and Benedick, played by actors called Zhu Xijuan and Jiao Huang. So this was what Shakespeare in the ‘original sauce’ looked like, with Chinese actors trying to erase every trace of their ethnic identity.
But what really caught me was that the actors, and for that mat
ter their costumes, looked suspiciously familiar. I was sure I’d seen them earlier.
I dug back through the albums and slid out one I’d flicked through a few minutes before. These photographs were much smaller and more roughly shot, but it was clear they depicted the same production of Much Ado About Nothing. One by one I scrutinised the images. The masked ball; the ill-fated lovers Hero and Claudio at the altar; the denunciation scene, in which Hero is accused of sleeping with another man: all were the same. Even the sets – a bucolic panorama studded with Tuscan pines, an Italianate palazzo swathed with ornate wall hangings – looked identical.
But these photos were from 1961, not 1979. I laid both albums carefully on the table, side by side, and found the rival photos of Beatrice and Benedick; him in front of her, the doorway, her smiling. The couple were Zhu and Jiao, no question. Their poses were almost identical, as were their clothes. They were twins, the only real difference being the age of the photographs. Eighteen years apart.
In London or New York, shows were always transferring between different theatres, or being revived a year or two later. But such pauses were generally brief; and even Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap, which has theoretically been running uninterruptedly since 1952, had changed its cast and creative team so often that it was like the proverbial shovel that stays the same despite five new handles and twenty-eight new blades.
Why stage the same Much Ado About Nothing with what seemed to be an identical cast, eighteen years later? I reached for my books. The answer haunted all those conversations I’d had: the Cultural Revolution.
In the Dramatic Arts Centre café, I pieced together the story, which had been written about by the theatre historians Li Ruru and Alexa Huang. The Much Ado About Nothing I’d been looking at was indeed the same show, though in its original form it was even older: it dated from 1957, and had been created during the period when China and the USSR were intimate siblings. A well-regarded Soviet director, Yevgeniya Konstantinova Lipkovskaya, was part of a cultural delegation sent out from Leningrad to help set up the Shanghai Theatre Academy. She had stayed two years and directed two productions; Much Ado About Nothing was the second. Her cast were students. The translation was Zhu Shenghao’s.
When it first went on stage in autumn 1957, Lipkovskaya’s version of Shakespeare’s summery comedy was acclaimed as a ‘magnificent’ demonstration of what Chinese huaju could learn from the west. Designed to look as if the actors had stepped out of a quattrocento fresco, it presented an enticingly distant world, one safely removed from the uneasy realities of the Hundred Flowers campaign. As the curtain rose on the shimmering Sicilian city of Messina, recreated in painstaking detail down to the roast goose on a silver salver, even the title – translated as Wushi shengfei (‘Looking for Trouble in Trivial Matters’) – seemed to illustrate the point. This was Shakespeare as sunny, escapist fantasy.
But Much Ado About Nothing, like everything else, found itself sucked into China’s tumultuous cultural politics. Originally intended to be revived in 1958, the production had to be halted in the chaos of the Great Leap Forward, and it wasn’t until 1961 – Lipkovskaya long gone and the USSR and China no longer on speaking terms – that it made its way back on stage. Hu Dao, Lipkovskaya’s assistant, directed. Again it was a hit. Alongside the production photos I found a shot of a long line of people queuing outside the theatre, clutching parasols against the fierce Shanghai sun.
No one knew it, but when the curtain came down on Much Ado About Nothing two months later it would be one of the last times that Shakespeare would be seen on the professional Chinese stage in nearly twenty years. The following year there was a production at the Shanghai Film School of Twelfth Night – another comedy, again a revival – but that same summer, 1962, there was a scandal around a satirical play referencing Mao, and Madame Mao had her excuse. Its author was arrested. Four years later the Cultural Revolution would be in full, murderous sway and Shakespeare forbidden entirely.
So what of the 1979 Much Ado About Nothing, apparently identical in every respect to its 1961 incarnation? Incredible as it seemed, as well as being nearly the last professional production of Shakespeare to be seen before the Cultural Revolution, it was the very first to go on stage afterwards. Three years after Mao’s death – the same strange, suspenseful year that the Chinese premier Deng Xioaping met US president Jimmy Carter to negotiate a policy of detente – as many of the original performers as could be found assembled in a rehearsal room and prepared to do Much Ado About Nothing one final time. The scripts were retrieved from the archive, along with the director’s notes. The set was carefully reconstructed. Zhu Xijuan and Jiao Huang and other members of the 1961 cast relearned their lines. Costumes, design, choreography: everything the same. It would be as if nothing had happened.
Li Ruru, sent to work in the fields as a teenager, had seen the production as part of the first cohort of students to study at the Shanghai Drama Academy after the Cultural Revolution. I found her account of it almost unbearably poignant. ‘“Much ado about nothing” in Chinese seemed such a beautiful expression,’ she wrote. ‘We hoped it could excise our bitter experience with the easy and confident wisdom that the title implies.’
I found Benedick. Now seventy-nine, Jiao Huang had become one of China’s biggest theatre stars and was a reliable presence in television historical dramas. He agreed to an interview. Shakespeare was one of his favourite writers; he would be overjoyed to discuss the great English poet.
When I arrived at his apartment, Jiao was in expansive mood: resplendent in American jeans and snakeskin cowboy boots, with wide, pronounced features and hair slicked back in a flamboyant quiff. On the way up the stairs, he thumped a metal breastplate attached to the wall – his costume in a recent production of Antony and Cleopatra. Above it was a terracotta plate, a gift from the Shakespeare Society of China.
Yes, he chuckled through a nimbus of cigarette smoke, he had indeed been in that Much Ado About Nothing. Not twice, though: all three times. In 1957 he had been too young to take a main role; he and his student colleagues had been cast in bit parts – knights, servants, guards, spear-carriers, all adding to the grand Italianate effect.
In 1961 it had finally been his turn; in Hu Dao’s revival, he was chosen to play Benedick. From the shelf next to him, crammed with gold statuettes, he prised an album and found the relevant page – Jiao stripped to his doublet in the duel scene; looking rogueish in his officer’s uniform. It was definitely the same production. In the background was the splendid stained glass of a church, meticulously imitated by Lipkovskaya’s technicians. It made a tiny stage in Shanghai look like the cathedral of Notre Dame.
‘It all wove together seamlessly,’ he said. ‘The music and dance was beautiful; the dances were choreographed by another Soviet expert, I think. At the academy, we had dance classes for two years – two classes on western dancing, two on Chinese dancing. Eight classes in total including review sessions, every week.’
He looked rapturous at the memory. ‘The body movements, the pace and the speed – Shakespeare’s plays in particular, you cannot do them without this knowledge.’
How had audiences reacted?
‘Every show was a full house, every night for two months. It was so lively, no one had ever seen anything like it. Everyone walked out of the theatre with a big smile on their faces.’ He turned to me with a wink. ‘A few years ago, I saw a British film version of Much Ado About Nothing. I think our performance was just as good as theirs.’
Did he ever feel uncomfortable wearing western costumes – the hairpieces, false noses and the rest?
He emitted an explosive bark of laughter, and fired up another cigarette. ‘To perform a foreign play, you cannot be Chinese. Lin Zhaohua in Beijing, he transforms Shakespeare’s plays into something completely Chinese. Myself, I don’t like this. What is the point of creating something if there is no difficulty at all? For each play I perform, I must change completely, from inside out, like a rebirth.’
&nbs
p; Beneath the swaggering bravado I detected something else. As we talked more, its source became clear. Once the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, Jiao and his fellow actors were given a stark choice: appear in revolutionary operas, or abandon any hope of performing at all. Jiao chose the latter, and was dispatched to do farm work in the countryside outside Shanghai.
‘I didn’t perform for nine years. Foreign plays were all criticised. If you were passionate about western plays, you would be so severely criticised that you couldn’t lift your head …’
He stopped. The translator, embarrassed, was staring at her feet. Jiao had begun to cry.
When he restarted, his voice was hoarse. ‘I lived in a cowshed. I experienced everything. My house was destroyed.’
Many people in the west would find it bizarre, I said, staging exactly the same production in exactly the same way after the Cultural Revolution, as if those ten terrible years had never happened.
His gaze was level. ‘I was even more passionate about performing Shakespeare’s play. I poured all my energies into it. It is part of civilisation, is it not? How can anyone abandon it?’
Had it been hard, revisiting something from much happier times?
‘Every single performance was different from before. The way we looked was not different, but the feelings and emotions were never the same.’
In 2012 he’d directed Antony and Cleopatra, a lifetime’s ambition. It was an unashamedly old-fashioned production, he said, showing me photos that proved the point. He read out a passage from the essay he’d written for the programme. It was hardly poetry, particularly in translation, but I was caught by his suggestion that ‘history is like a mirror of the sky, reflecting the changes of society and human beings’. Perhaps Shakespeare’s plays could provide a kind of consolation for the bitter sorrows and humiliations of human experience. Mirroring history, they also helped make sense of it.
Worlds Elsewhere Page 53
