Snow in Midsummer at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon

(Disclaimer: this is one of my stream-of-consciousness reviews, stuffed with rambly excitement and tangents.)

I recently made the trek up to Stratford-upon-Avon to see Snow in Midsummer, the 13th-century Chinese classic by Guan Hanqing also known as The Injustice to Dou E, in a radical new adaptation by playwright Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig and directed by Justin Audibert. Audience members filtering into the velvety Swan Theatre may have been enchanted by a large tapestry in the style of a Chinese ink painting draped over the stage, or the trill of birds, lutes and flutes. Scottish actress Katie Leung, girlish and coy, is trying to sell her weavings to those sitting in the front row. But this is all clever misdirection that relies on certain expectations of “the Oriental play”. Leung scampers off stage and – bam! – the chintzy tapestry falls, neon lights set the stage ablaze, a DJ on the overhang above the stage is dropping some heavy beats, and we’ve been transported to what looks like the heart of present-day Hong Kong.

It’s a gritty urban space called New Harmony, where the well-heeled industrialist Tian Yun (Wendy Kweh) is set to purchase a large factory from the young tycoon Handsome (Colin Ryan), who’s excited to finally embark on a round-the-world vacation with his boyfriend Rocket (Andrew Leung). But what would Snow in Midsummer be without a festering family secret and a delightfully vengeful spirit? Katie Leung’s Dou Yi claws her way out of the grave to haunt Tianyun’s seven-year-old daughter, Fei-Fei (Zoe Lim), and a dark curse begins to spread across the ailing town.

Seeing this slick, sexy production at the Swan Theatre had me imagining what it would be like if the posh Beijing People’s Art Theatre did a contemporary adaptation of Cao Yu’s hyper-incestuous plot-twisty Thunderstorm (1934) in Kardashian reality TV style. (They would never, but a girl can dream.) Audibert’s flamboyant, confident take on Snow in Midsummer blends the tropes of popular Hong Kong television serials – the kind that knows exactly how to whet and sate the appetites of millions of viewers – with high classical drama. The Yuan Dynasty play pre-dates Shakespeare by about 200 years, but through a Western lens there’s inevitably a touch of the Shakespearean about it, and Snow in Midsummer is a veritable feast of big, meaty dramatic arcs. The emphatic, flickering neon signs on stage are emblazoned with the themes of the play, including 正义 (zheng yi; justice), 冤枉 (yuan wang; usually translated as being falsely or wrongly accused of something, but loaded with a particularly potent sense of bitterness), and 无辜 (wu gu; innocence) – obvious to a Chinese-speaking audience but a nice touch of subliminal messaging to those who don’t understand the language.

This production is showy and grand, utterly horrifying but also very funny – a vivid, violent death in one scene may immediately be followed by a bawdy, debauched one (my favourite scene might have been the three People’s Army soldiers exchanging advice on flirty text messaging), a nod to the fact that Shakespeare isn't the only one blending epic deaths, buffoons and the use of comic relief. Sure, the second half drags its feet with the technical exposition required to set up a series of “oh no they didn't!” plot twists. But, oh, these outrageous, juicy plot twists, they had my Hong Kong drama serial loving heart. And they would probably have your heart too, if you gasped when Darth Vader declared to Luke Skywalker: “No, I am your father!”

And then there are the homages to Asia’s particular genre specialty – the genuinely terrifying horror film. Did I spy the long-haired Sadako from The Ring (1998) in one of Dou Yi’s appearances? The ghost’s relentless desire for revenge immediately brings up Ju-On (2000), the grudge that keeps on giving – and there are strong echoes of the Pang Brothers’ The Eye (2002), in which a cornea transplant goes horribly wrong. Of note to those who have already seen the play – in Singapore, the Human Organ Transplant Act was only passed in 1987, and huge debate across members of all religions surrounded its amendments in 2004; the Islamic Religious Council of Singapore issued a fatwa in 2007 so that Muslims could also come under the Act. Even as a secular nation where there’s a strong separation of religion and state, the connection between organ donation and the afterlife was something that we, as a country, wrestled with well into the late 20th and early 21st century.

Which leads me to one of my favourite things about this contemporary update of Guan’s play: its matter-of-fact inclusion of the supernatural as part of a daily lived experience. “Chinese scholars” don’t need to tell you that strong beliefs in the supernatural still exist in the East – the same way Western/English scholars don’t need to tell you that strong beliefs in the supernatural do still exist in the West. Whether you have deep convictions and roots in Christianity or Taoism, one thing is for certain – both religions and cultures are tied to a strong belief in the spiritual and supernatural. And these everyday beliefs are everyday fixtures in Snow in Midsummer, woven into the play and normalised beautifully and generously. In several scenes, there’s a meticulous altar to the Goddess of Mercy and, later on, an instantly recognizable funeral altar laden with food and gifts to the deceased. None of these cultural traditions are “a curiosity” – in the play, a routine visit to a temple is part of the fabric of everyday living the way one might go for weekly mass or a bible study. Superstition and science not only rub up against each other – they coexist.

Snow in Midsummer is a good exemplar of how a complicated Chinese classic can become a pacy contemporary adaptation – one that’s reverent in its treatment of Asian work and translation, but also deliciously irreverent when it comes to playing with tropes and conventions, whether it’s melodrama or horror. This production marks the beginning of the RSC’s Chinese Translations Project, and – permit me this Asian stereotype – it looks like a downright auspicious one.

Stray thoughts, including mild spoilers:

• I’m pretty sure there are people in Hong Kong whose names are indeed Handsome and Rocket. (Names I’ve come across: Virus, Bubbles, Drizzle, Apple, you get the idea.)

• This could have been completely arbitrary, but I loved how the various UK accents mapped relatively well onto their Chinese counterparts. Katie Leung has a Scottish lilt, and her character Dou Yi is also from the north. Wendy Kweh is from Singapore, and I definitely mapped my archetype of the affluent, practical Singaporean businesswoman onto Tianyun. Like I said, it was probably unintentional, but so much fun to imagine.

• I totally called the death by rat poison. I KNEW IT.

In the Depths of Dead Love at the Print Room

I recently reviewed a controversial production of Howard Barker's In the Depths of Dead Love at the Print Room at the Coronet, which faced fierce accusations of 'yellowface' casting and a protest on the opening night of the play. This review was first published in Exeunt Magazine.

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As someone who translates literary work from Chinese to English, my currency is precision of language. Can I communicate what the author wants to say – not only in intent, but in tone? There are several schools of thought here: one could retain that “exotic flavour” of Chineseness in the text by valuing the literal over the literary; or one could translate the work such that it feels, in English, as close to the way it is felt in Chinese.

When I was much younger, I would read abridged versions of Chinese classics such as The Water Margin or Dream of the Red Chamber (which is sometimes translated as A Dream of Red Mansions or A Dream of Red Pavilions). Many of these adaptations for young audiences came in both English and Chinese, and to my bilingual ears, the English translations would invariably sound verbose and clumsy – the original Chinese, sharp and succinct. I would come to realise, much later on, that many readers who only understood English largely assumed that Chinese was a florid language because of these literal translations, when in fact it was the prolixity of English that made it so. Chinese idioms, for instance, can be incredibly evocative in four choice words, when it might take several sentences to explain them in English.

In In the Depths of Dead Love, playwright Howard Barker’s characters speak exactly like these over-literal, wilfully exotic translations. The suicidal Lady Hasi (Stella Gonet) visits the poet Chin’s “bottomless” well every day, hoping she might have the courage to take the leap and die. She describes her falling silk handkerchief and how it might land on her face “quite possibly like a fine scattering of snow”. Chin (James Clyde), who’s been commanded by Hasi’s husband Lord Ghang (William Chubb) to give her the push she needs, craves the sensuality of Hasi’s shoulders, shoulders “as frail as two twigs” that might have been braided together “by a solitary child in the forest”. The forced poetry in every line often feels like a ridiculous parody of how a non-Chinese speaker might imagine a Chinese speaker would sound like if Chinese were English. And even if the all-white cast had been entirely Asian, the sting of this artifice would remain.

By setting a play in ancient China, Barker may argue that he’s employing a “distancing effect” by having “rarely ever set a play in my own culture”. The converse is also true, that by deliberately setting a piece in a specific place the audience is invited to bring to the production their cultural preconceptions and misconceptions of this location. The setting, Barker insists, is “entirely artificial” and “entirely European in its sensibilities” – in which case it seems puzzling to be so specific about the location at all. In fact, there’s a blatant disregard of any understanding of the Chinese language, where Barker toys with the words “push” and “shove” in English as a plot device and attempts to evoke some humour in the wordplay; in Chinese, the root word for both is the same (推; tui), which strips the puns of any meaning. While the Print Room at the Coronet wrestled with accusations of yellowface in its casting of this play, I’d argue that the problems here go beyond the choice of actors. It’s the deliberate decision to frame the play with a certain culture in mind, then to rely on the audience’s stereotypes about this culture’s people and history in order to propel the plot forward, and then to insist that this culture is merely a metaphor because “the theatre isn’t a place for literalness”.

What makes a metaphor an effective one? Metaphor is often at the heart of the fable and the parable, the simple, sometimes whimsical or mythical stories that hold universal truths and draw unexpected parallels with our present realities. I’m reminded of the fable of the frog in the well, one of the first idioms that children learn (the idiom, in all its beautiful brevity, is 井底之蛙; jing di zhi wa, which expands to “the frog at the bottom of the well”). Popularised by the Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi (around the 4th century B.C.), the story goes that a frog living at the bottom of a well believes that the circle of sky above it is the entire world – until a sea turtle arrives and destroys this complacency, regaling the frog with stories of the ocean and what lies beyond. The frog is left speechless. Jing di zhi wa is now often used to describe someone who is ignorant or narrow-minded about the world.

Director Gerrard McArthur calls In the Depths of Dead Love a fable, but it’s really a faux fable with metaphor so thickly slathered, so artificial, so self-indulgent and aggressive in its search for the profound, with characters so thin I feared they would break. For a play that wrestles with mortality and confronting death, there are little to no stakes in the potential deaths of any of its characters. There’s a deliberate decision, a la Brecht, to expose the “bottomless” well in the centre of the stage as a shallow one of about two feet deep – but the production can’t seem to decide if this is a playful mockery of the suicidal act, or a serious visual aid used in several deeply emotional moments. The quartet of actors bluster and pontificate on the stage, doing their best to bring some energy to their conversations, but they can’t help that the protracted, trudging plot is mind-numbingly dull.

Barker has wrapped himself so securely in his theory of “theatre of catastrophe” that any criticism of him might feel futile, as his deliberate intention is to baffle and disorient the audience and to revel in an audience divided, whose expectations are constantly undermined. I wish I had felt baffled and disoriented, I wish my expectations had been undermined; instead I was bored. My companion fell asleep for 10 minutes and woke to find she had missed barely anything at all. She had closed her eyes to get a sense of what the play might have been like in its first incarnation as a radio play, and concluded that the physical staging of the piece hadn’t added very much to it at all.

I believe that theatre can and should transgress, should rupture boundaries and provoke its audiences to reassess themselves. But I think these profanations are also the most effective and revelatory when their creator has a deep understanding of the culture he is choosing to subvert. When these confrontations feel completely arbitrary, or rely on tired stereotypes, then the power of the provocation quickly fades away.

After watching this play, I felt very much like the turtle gazing down with pity at the frog at the bottom of its narrow, dried-up well.

A quick update

A very quick round-up of what I've been up to:

• Here in London, I'm writing for Everything Theatre and Exeunt Magazine as a contributing reviewer. So far I've reviewed A Wonderful Town at Ye Olde Rose & Crown Theatre Pub, and Tomorrow I Was Always A Lion by the Belarus Free Theatre. I'll be reviewing about 2-4 shows a month.
• Come for the Battersea Arts Centre's upcoming production, London Stories: Made By Migrants (Nov 4-26). I'm a volunteer and you might be in one of the small groups I'll be bringing around their lovely space.
• Back home in Singapore, my translation of Wu I-Wei's short story The Mountain Road is part of BooksActually's Gold Standard 2016, an anthology of short fiction previously unpublished in English edited by the wonderful Julie Koh. You can go for the launch on Nov 13 at the Singapore Writers Festival.

If you're in London and would like to meet up, do drop me a line.