“Where Inspector Zhong?” Pidgin again!
“In theatre. Shanghai Theatre Academy on Hua Shan, 630.” Then the phone clicked off.
Fong looked at Lily. He wasn’t pleased.
“Lady sound desperate for seeing you, Zhong Fong.”
Then, in wonderful saucy Shanghanese, she added, “This lady in front of you is more than desperate, this lady waits in sweet anticipation for seeing you.”
Fong’s face didn’t break a smile.
Finally in English Lily said, “So I shitted up, don’t fuck on me.”
Fong was unable to top that so he shook his head and headed home. His only solace was the fact that few people, Chinese or otherwise, were clever enough to find the academy, let alone the theatre in the academy compound. And Richard Fallon’s widow didn’t sound all that bright.
Geoffrey Hyland was winning at a game that he had played since he was first paid to direct a play at the tender age of eighteen. He was guiding human material into art, using a play as a template but not a score. He didn’t direct the way a conductor conducts a symphony. He worked more like the lead player in a jazz ensemble. He set the theme, and made sure that everyone else knew the key signature and the tempo and then off they went: improvising freely from each other to create something that lived and breathed, had rough edges-was of life itself. All he demanded was good listening and real talking from his actors. He insisted that they play the “what game.” If someone, anyone on stage at any time, spoke a line to them that didn’t make sense, that they couldn’t believe or in any way seemed “actorly” they were to say “What?” At which point the partner had to redeliver the line, sometimes many times, until some real signal was passed. At first, the actors were reluctant to use this technique; to them it implied condemnation of a fellow actor’s work. But once Hao Yong, the brilliant young actress playing Viola, used it against Feste and then used it again and again to get the old charlatan to finally give her something real to playoff of. . . well, they were off to the races. And race was the right metaphor. An emotional race with which everyone onstage and Geoffrey in the auditorium had to keep up. It was early but already exciting.
Geoffrey’s Mandarin had improved greatly from the time eleven years ago when he first worked in Shanghai on The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, but he still worked with an interpreter at his side. Even in that first play, by the end of the second week he seldom needed his interpreter’s help. Geoffrey, like many stage directors, quickly memorized the script as the actors worked and hence knew where in the text the actors were at each moment. Although he could not exactly pinpoint which Mandarin word was which English word, he could always identify the emotional shifts required in the text and was able to see whether a shift was played by the actor or not. It was for this reason that the language was not a real barrier. If the States of Being were right, and that was something Geoffrey could see, and the actions played were right, then the image (that part of acting contained in the word) would basically look after itself. At least that was true in texts like Rita Joe where the language was not really of the essence. It was obviously less true of Shakespeare texts.
Geoffrey held up his hand for a moment and called out “Hao” (good). He turned to his interpreter and asked Hao Yong to join them. She was now in her late twenties but she still carried herself like the teenager she had been when she played Rita Joe for Geoffrey those eleven years ago. Since then, she had been in a show a year for Geoffrey, sometimes more. She was talent that walked and talked. Not pretty, but so alive that when she smiled you smiled with her. In the eleven years she had learned a little English, enough to hold her own at lunch with Geoffrey from time to time. Enough to have been his lover briefly some seven years ago. Before Fu Tsong.
“Help me with the language here.” He pointed to the Viola/Olivia scene and the three of them went through it line by line. “When you read this translation, Hao Yong, does it feel like Viola is falling under the power of Olivia?”
For a moment Hao Yong looked at Geoffrey and then with an apologetic shrug of her slim shoulders turned to the translator. There followed a rapid and animated conversation in Shanghanese which left Geoffrey completely at a loss. He loved the way the Chinese actors talked about things like this. For years he thought that every Chinese conversation was a yelling match, but now he didn’t think so. Now he knew they were yelling matches.
He watched Hao Yong’s face with a growing pleasure. As a student she had been truly brilliant. As a professional actor she was one of the few who was able to overcome her training. She had shucked off the old Stanislavski stranglehold and was in freefall. An artist of true power. But after all these years how little he knew of her. He had never been to her home. He knew that she was married now but he’d never met her husband. He didn’t even know if she was an only child; it was likely that she was as she’d been born in the onechild era. But she carried herself and used the knowledge of one who came from a more extended family.
One of the strange ramifications of the single-child policy in China had been the loss of one of the basic communication tools for an actor. Actors use simple family relationships (father/son, older brother/younger sister, husband/wife, lovers, etc.) to convey to an audience the nature of more complex relationships. When an actor goes to work on, say, the relationship between a teacher and a student, the actor playing the teacher chooses father/son while the actor playing the student chooses younger brother to older brother. The ability to find conflicts even on the basic level of relationship greatly enriches performance. From the audience’s perspective they ’get’ teacher/student because they identify with it as either father/son or older brother/younger brother. But with the single-child policy, the basic knowledge of brothers and sisters has been diluted if not lost. It has removed a potent weapon from the actor’s arsenal. Some claim the other loss is that single children never learn how to play properly. Being the only child that the parents will ever have, the child is put under enormous pressure to succeed. Nightly, parents do the child’s homework with them. Weekends are often spent preparing for the child’s examinations. Getting into university has become an obsession in China. During the final callbacks for entrance to the Shanghai Theatre Academy, the 120 finalists, who had been chosen from over 2,800 applicants from across China, arrived on campus with parents and grandparents in tow. They were dressed and preened and poked like show dogs. It occurred to Geoffrey that the loss of sibling feeling and the loss of the ability to play could have serious effects on a society as a whole. But his mind did not travel comfortably in the world of sociopolitics.
Hao Yong turned to him and touched his hand to bring him back to the present. What an enormous advance in contact that was. They had worked on three shows together before he felt it acceptable to touch her in any way. Her cool hand tapped the base of his palm and in accented, but pretty English, she said, “You think Viola love Olivia?” Her eyes twinkled. After all this time, she certainly knew that was precisely what he thought. “Yes, me too.”
“Good,” he said, “but does the language support that?”
“No,” she said, “but the silences do.”
She smiled at him and for a moment he wondered how he ever let her get away. Then he said, “Hao” and was about to let rehearsal start up again when Hao Yong smiled at Geoffrey and said, “Viola is narcoticized to Olivia.”
Geoffrey was lost and turned to the translator. A brief moment later, his translator, now embarrassed, said, “She says that Viola is addicted to Olivia.”
Seeking clarification that he did not really need, Geoffrey asked, “Addicted but not drugged?”
After a moment of conversation in Mandarin, Hao Yong squatted on the stage, her dress tucked between her knees, so that her face was at the height of Geoffrey’s as he stood on the auditorium floor. “No, Geoffrey,” she said, her eyes dancing again, “not drugged-addicted.” Then a smile erupted across her face. She turned back to Olivia and, spreading her arms, sang out, “Build me a willow cabin at your gates. . .”