He'll Die Before He's Sold
by William Bonney & Wu Runmei
photos by Zhao Dechun
The worriers should meet Meng Jinghui. The Beijing stage director, whose singular interpretation of Nobel laureate Dario Fo's "Accidental Death of an Anarchist" just finished a successful six-week run, believes audiences still want to be provoked, forced to question and ponder, and shown that art still matters. The way Meng, in his early 30s, figures it, he is just the man to do that. In fact, he may think he is the only one.
Breezily late for an interview at the cavernous Haidian Theater, where one of the final performances of "Anarchist" was to be staged, Meng speaks of his work as one of China's more provocative directors with a confidence that critics call arrogance. He is unabashed in his belief in his own abilities, and the techniques that set his work apart from his theatrical peers.
"I am the best director," he says, discussing his
reputation for putting his stamp on plays he didn't write. "Each one of my plays is a
good one. They are the best in Beijing and China."
But comparing his plays to others --or even to their original texts --is no easy task. Consider "Accidental Death of an Anarchist," in which policemen who have beaten an anarchist prisoner to death in their custody try to find a substitute to take the blame. Fo's work is shot through with often crude language and blunt humor to make his point, but it's highly unlikely there are lines from songs by Cui Jian, one of China's original rock 'n' roll rebels, in the original text.
Similar references to Chinese society peppered his staging of other European plays, such as Eugene Ionesco's "The Bel Soprano," Harold Pinter's "The Dumbwaiter," and the minimalist favorite "Waiting for Godot" by Samuel Beckett. His distinctive approach also extends to domestic drama. He does it, he says, because he has a sense of mission.
"The last play I did [Vicious Talk Street], Guo Shixing [the playwright] attended the rehearsal. Both him and me were uncomfortable," Meng says. But the discomfort was felt for different reasons.
One reviewer, writing in the San Lian Life Weekly in October, put it this way: "When a gifted person works with a talentless one, the result is certainly ridiculous. The play "Vicious Talk Street" has proved the truth of this... Using wisecracks and tongue twisters to make up a play can only have one result: superficial cheerfulness on top of barren and empty content. Director Meng Jinghui's method sets off the emptiness of the play."
Meng is not afraid of using his plays as instruments of instruction, even if it means straying from the original text.
"I feel the audience is a kind of object to be educated," he says. His view of theater breaks down into an analysis of roles and functions in which the text of the play, and to some extent the actors on stage are secondary.
What comes first are the forms and themes of his plays, followed very closely by Meng's own thoughts. He says he chose to stage Fo's play because he wanted to work with the themes of social criticism, political attitudes and the playwright's depiction of people's dignity and respect.
"That's more important than the content," Meng says.
His notion of the system of director centralization is taken from Vsevolod Meyerhold, a Russian director of the early 20th century who is one influence Meng doesn't mind mentioning.
"There are two types of directors --one (faithfully) puts the original play on stage, another type of director likes to add his or her own subjectivity into the play. I am the latter type" Meng says, waving his hands around the drafty theater lobby for emphasis as he talks of Meyerhold's philosophy.
"He once said: 'The director is the writer of the stage.' To the director, the music, the play, the actors and actresses are all useful. The director can use them to make beautiful melodies. Some critics have said that an actor who works with such a director may be ruined by being manipulated as an emblem or symbol on the stage. But I say the best actors and actresses are willing to work with the best directors."
Meng says his next project will be a Chinese contemporary drama --"The Killer Butterfly" by Liao Yimei --whose title, he quickly points out, has a more serious meaning in Chinese. It is still in the planning stages, and will likely be put on sometime early this year.
He has a suitably avant-garde attitude to commercial success, though he says it's been nice to see audiences grow, especially at "Accidental Death of an Anarchist." Still, he's not about to start selling out and making concessions to an unthinking public, he says.
"It has nothing to do with earning more money and drawing in more audiences," he says resolutely. "I don't care about the audience. I just care about myself. There are funny things in my plays that make people laugh. But to please the audience or laugh for laughter's sake, that is not my intention. I want people to think after they stop laughing."