Strindberg's Miss Julie Singing in Beijing Opera in Shanghai
2014-07-11
For those who had chosen to go to Academy Theatre on this past Monday evening, their Monday fully packed with panel discussions and workshops ended with an incomparable delicacy. Shang Theatre Academy, chief organizer of PSi (Performance Studies International) 20, presented Miss Julie as "a new Beijing Opera after Strindberg" to some 500 assorted audience from all corners of the earth as one of the showcase performances for the 5-day conference closing on July 8.
For those who know not a thing about August Strindberg, the performance is an organic whole in its own right. Thrived on the universal language of love complicated with jealous and frustration, self-fulfillment and social expectations, and above all, sexual desire and class hatred , the 70-minute Beijing Opera features a frustrated Miss Zhuli (Julie) flirting with her cook's fiancee Xiang qiang (Jean), losing her virginity to him in her drunk hours and destroying her otherwise privileged and respectable life.
The adapters, Sun Huizhu (aka William Huizhu Sun) and Fei Chunfang (aka Faye Chunfang Fei), localize Strindberg's plot masterfully, presented in superb Chinese libretto and English subtitles. Instead of it being Miss Julie's mid-summer night's frenzy because of her deplorable instinct and upbringing, the new Miss Julie now involves an austere landlord's strong-minded daughter falling for the housemaid's handsome husband-to-be leading the lion dancing. The deployment of this traditional Chinese ritual for celebration embodying the prowess of masculinity and power adds a more clearly stated cultural dimension to the fall of Miss Zhuli or Julie.
Accordingly, one of the highlights of the play is when Miss Zhuli gets Xiangqiang to do the dance again with her in the kitchen after several glasses of wine. In dimmer lights and flighty minds, both the woman and the man breaking the social taboos are totally engaged in the social dance that they transform into an intoxicating foreplay. No audience bother to be social critics at that moment of purer human communication.
At daybreak, life on the stage gets uglier. All human weakness and folly comes to play when all three characters lay their card of interest on the table. The symbolic death of Miss zhuli's caged bird may or may not suggest her death, but Xiangqiang as the merciless murder of the bird has certainly won no sympathy from the audience in his revenge that is instantly suppressed at the sight of the landlord coming home. The carnivalesque disorder disappears when xiangqiang leaves the stage with the cleaned robe and boots of his master, both of which he has tried on triumphantly and to the helplessness of a flabbergasted Miss Zhuli/Julie.
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