Centuries-old opera unites East and West in exploration of emotions

NANCHANG — With a Chinese performer portraying Du Liniang, the female lead, and an Irish performer as Liu Mengmei, the male lead, an English-language rendition of the Kunqu Opera masterpiece The Peony Pavilion came to life at the Seventh Tang Xianzu International Theatre Exchange Month in Fuzhou, Jiangxi province.

The theater festival, which opened in late October, concluded on Dec 7. It attracted over 1,000 experts, scholars, students, and drama enthusiasts from around the world. This year's English-language plays and operas program highlighted fresh possibilities for integrating East and West theater traditions.

Michael Dobson, director of the Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham in the heart of Shakespeare's beautiful Stratford-upon-Avon, who brought the English version of The Peony Pavilion to Tang Xianzu's hometown of Fuzhou, says he tried to break past the original audience to reach a broader world and gain due influence.

"It's as if Tang Xianzu and Shakespeare were living at the same time and had worked in the same place," he says, adding that his crew included students from the United Kingdom, China, the United States, and Ireland.

Bridging the cultural divide is never easy, yet each performance forged its own path to interpret the masterpiece and unite different cultures.

For British actor Liberty Myers O'Dell, his approach was to conduct extensive research and study various adaptations of The Peony Pavilion. "I looked at ancient Chinese opera and tried to integrate the same grand movements, but did them a little faster. My intention is still to connect the physicality with the vocal tradition that I saw when I did my research," he says.

At the same time, Chinese performer Zhou Jingxuan was inspired by the language. "One of the things that strikes me most is that, when reciting English lines in British theater, there are many combinations of consonants and vowels in your lines, which makes you more powerful and dramatic when you express that line in English. This is the most different thing between Chinese and British theater," Zhou says.

In Dobson's eyes, Shakespeare depicted the complexity of human nature, while Tang Xianzu wrote about the pursuit of the soul. Both were asking "what is life?", which is the core theme in the continuous dialogues between Eastern and Western dramas, he says.

For British actor Matt Grey, the cultural connection was what attracted him to participate in this year's festival. "It's really exciting because it makes you realize that for hundreds and thousands of years, people around the globe have experienced similar things — love, jealousy, deceit, kindness — universal human traits," he says.

"When those are explored across cultures, it gives you a deeper, clearer understanding of what it means to be human," he adds.

Fuzhou established a sister-city relationship with Stratford-upon-Avon in 2016. Over the years, people-to-people exchanges have been boosted between the two cities. For example, students in Fuzhou traveled to the United Kingdom to participate in commemorative activities for Shakespeare's birthday. During their return visit, British students experienced the artistic essence of Tang Xianzu's plays in traditional Chinese gardens.