In the right direction

Shanghai Dramatic Arts Center presents its Chinese production of Anton Chekhov's play Uncle Vanya.[Photo/Provided to China Daily]

Shanghai Dramatic Arts Center has embarked on a five-year project to upgrade its production. It plans to showcase highly acclaimed plays from other countries to its audiences. Zhang Kun reports in Shanghai.

Adolf Shapiro makes even the most experienced actors at Shanghai Dramatic Arts Center confused and at a loss.

The Russian director asks actors to rehearse each scene time and time again, stopping sometimes to act out each part himself.

"We - especially the more experienced of us - found that hard to take at first," says Lyu Liang, a veteran actor, theater director and artistic director of SDAC. "It felt as if he didn't trust our abilities to work out a character."

Shapiro has been invited to work with SDAC on a Chinese production of Anton Chekhov's play Uncle Vanya. In the play which premiered on June 20, Lyu played the leading role of Uncle Vanya.

It's the first project of a five-year plan to introduce highly recognized or classic plays from other countries to SDAC every year. For each project, the center plans to invite an acclaimed director from the home country of the play to work with SDAC staff.

"We want to go back to tradition, the base of theater, and hopefully audiences will appreciate the effort," Lyu says.

SDAC will produce more than 50 plays this year, half of which are translated works, and the other half domestic creations. Half of the plays will have a second-round presentation and become profitable, according to the center's publicity department. The center spends an average of about a month to produce a new play.

"Rehearsals are done on tight schedules," Lyu says. "We no longer give deep thought about the motivation and subconscious. We have given back to our teachers whatever we learned in school."

By acting out the slightest detailed movements himself, Russian director Shapiro creates the characters together with the actors. He leads the actors into an exploration of the deep and rich emotional world of characters, and helps them to read between the lines of the script.

As an experienced actor, Lyu is obviously appreciative of Shapiro's methods. "We can easily draw from previous acting experiences for a new character, but we've forgotten that each play is about one particular experience," he says, adding that working with the Russian director, "We pick it back up, the core and basics of theater art."

The play Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekhov was published in 1897 and premiered two years later by director Konstantin Stanislavski.

Stanislavski is known all over the world for founding the "Stanislavski System", a technique for training actors. The system encourages actors to draw from their true emotional experiences to create roles and dig into the subconscious motivation of their characters.

Shapiro studied under Stanislavski's student Maria Knebel, and is internationally famous for directing plays by Chekhov and Bertolt Brecht. Stanislavski System is not a museum, but a living system, he stresses. "The more the world changes, the heavier weight tradition should be. Tradition can develop too, responding to the changes of the world," Shapiro says.

The story of Uncle Vanya seems lacking in dramatic conflict, which makes the emotional tension especially important: An elderly professor visits his rural estate which supports his life in the city. Uncle Vanya, who has managed the place for decades, is disappointed and disillusioned to learn the professor is planning to sell the estate.

It's not a play about the contrast between urban and suburban lifestyles. Subjects such as love, death and faith, are permanent for the human race, says the director. "If what we have done proves to be helpful for our actors in their future work, I will be greatly honored."

If you go:

7:30 pm, Tuesday-Saturday; 2 pm, Sunday, June 20-July 7.

Shanghai Dramatic Arts Center — Art Theater, 1F, 288 Anfu Road, Shanghai.

021-6473-0123