Shakespeare’s dedicated student
Theater auteur Joseph Graves has either directed or acted in all of Shakespeare’s works over the course of his career. He tells Han Bingbin about how the English playwright has impacted his life.
Achair, a desk and a solemn picture of William Shakespeare shape the haunting simplicity of the tale Joseph Graves single-handedly weaves in Revel’s WorldofShakespeare, a complex, wildly comedic and deeply moving story of his childhood confusion and exploration related back to “the greatest of English writers”.
Just like in Shakespeare’s absorbing monologues, numerous times we think the protagonist is approaching the edge of emotional collapse — sweat trickling and body trembling — his passion, however, never stops burning.
“When you are alone on stage, your performance is usually that of a storyteller communicating directly to the audience, and this aloneness requires an unusual amount of sustained energy,” says Graves.
In his 35 years as a professional director and actor, Graves has performed several one- man shows, including most recently a one- man version of Homer’s The Iliad in New York City. Revel’s World of Shakespeare, however, is still one of the most emotionally challenging.
In it, Graves autobiographically explores the first two years of an “alternately some of them several times, in addition to dozens of his original creations.
“Shakespeare in some very real sense has helped define me, and perhaps, all of us in a far greater way than we realize,” he says.
“I’m not sure I want the play to deliver a message as such, but I do believe that dealing as it does with the impact a mentor can have on one’s life, nearly everyone can relate to and appreciate that such relationships can have profound importance to us.”
Carrying his Western theatrical heritage, Graves joined Peking University’s School of Foreign Studies in 2002 in mentoring its students on Shakespearean plays and later became the artistic director at the university’s Institute of World Theater and Film.
In the past decade, he has introduced to Chinese audiences a number of classical and contemporary plays, including Shakespeare’s, which “perhaps they would not have known of had I not been given that fine opportunity of staging them here”.
Graves also believes China has one of the oldest traditions of theatrical art in the world. Though spoken drama here is relatively new, he says, the tradition of China’s opera, which spans thousands of years, is a profound mix of storytelling, dance and music that is alive in the very soul of the Chinese people. That feeling has inspired him to direct several Chinese plays and operas in Chinese.
“Because China became so quickly important to me, and because theater has been, since I was a child, so very important to me, I wanted to bring these two great loves of mine, China and theater, together in a way they had not been together before,” he says.
The highest moral purpose strived for in drama is the teaching of the human heart through its sympathies and antipathies, the knowledge of itself, says Graves of the function of drama, quoting poet Percy Shelly’s preface to The Cenci.
He believes that human beings can benefit greatly from culture and art.
“From time to time, far too often, in fact, we as individuals feel utterly insignificant, are so often overcome with a hopeless sense that life has no real meaning. I deeply believe that all art serves as a lifebelt to rescue us from the ocean of meaninglessness,” he says. Contact the writer at hanbingbin@chinadaily.com.cn.