NEW PERSPECTIVE
A book on Shanghai which has been adapted for the stage is giving viewers a different view of the city. Yang Yang reports.
For Chinese writer Jin Yucheng, his novel Fan Hua is like a gift from the Muses. One day in 2011, when the then 59-year-old literature editor happened to walk under an overpass in Shanghai, he came across a female vendor.
“The woman used to be the most beautiful one around the Jing’ansi area in the 1960s. When I saw her, memories about at that time and the following decades suddenly flooded in,” he says.
Then, he decided to post some stories about those times on a local Shanghai online forum, where people share gossip about the city.
For seven months from May 2011, he posted a new piece written in the local dialect almost every day.
Then, in 2012, Jin had some of his stories published by one of top Chinese literature magazines Harvest under the title Fan Hua (Those Many Once Flourishing Flowers).
In 2015, his work won the Mao Dun Literary Award.
When Hong Kong film director Wong Kar-Wei decided to adapt the novel for the screen, he told Jin that the 442-page novel did not seem naturally suited for film or TV play adaption. So, if all went well, the film would not be released until 2025.
But now, a three-part theater adaption of the work is in production, with the first one staged in Shanghai, and Beijing, where audiences had to read the subtitles while watching the three-hour play performed in the Shanghai dialect.
In the novel, fiction and gossip are woven together against the backdrop of two different decades — the 1960s and the 1990s. And as the title indicates, there are so many characters that it is difficult to focus on a single one or several without diluting the essence of the plot.
Many readers say the novel is like a modern-day version of A Dream of Red Mansions.
And when scriptwriter Wen Fangyi was first approached to turn the work into a film script, she was hesitant to accept it, she says.
“I neither come from Shanghai, nor have I lived through the periods covered in the novel,” says the 27-year-old who first gained fame in 2012 as a junior student of theater at Nanjing University for the drama The Face of Chiang Kai-shek.
We want to stress the relationships between people against the urban backdrop of Shanghai.”
Wen Fangyi, scriptwriter
Wen created that drama based on anecdotes about a dinner held by Chiang at the National Central University in 1943, which later became the NJU, to celebrate the university’s 110th anniversary.
In her debut work, the four main characters were famed for their wit. The work was so popular it toured China in 2013.
Wen says that when she hesitated about taking up the Fan Hua project, Jin Yucheng “encouraged me to do it”.
Wen then walked around Shanghai searching for the places mentioned in the novel and talked to older people to get a feel of the city.
Meanwhile, due to the complicated plot and length of the work, Wen found it impossible to condense all the stories into one drama, so she split the work into three parts.
The first work focuses on the stories of three brothers: A Bao, Hu Sheng and Xiao Mao.
“We were very careful in creating the first season, strictly following the original style of Jin’s work,” she says.
“We want to stress the relationships between people against the urban backdrop of Shanghai, hoping to present Jin’s attitude in the novel: impartial; not to judge anything happening in the world of the novel, whether it is sorrowful or joyful.”
Although the novel talks about trivial things, they appear very poetic, which is what I try to keep in the drama,” she says.
Recently, hundreds gathered at the Beijing Tianqiao Performing Arts Center to see the first show of the Fan Hua trilogy.
And when the lights came on, there appeared a big disk in the center of the stage, which would revolve when necessary to represent action like strolling the streets or to express certain emotions. It was the creation of the director Ma Junfeng.
In the background, there was a big screen, on which abstract images or videos designed by artist Lei Lei would show to help create the visual feeling of the city.
The makers also invited Shanghai musician Lou Nanli, also known as B6, to create the electronic music for the play.
Explaining the use of multimedia in the drama to create the visual texture of Shanghai besides the use of props and scenery to replicate the city, Ma says: “Most people on our team come from other places and we are too young to understand the reality of life in the 1960s, or even in the 1990s. Our understanding of Shanghai during those times comes from newspapers, TV series or news.
“So, we tried to use current visual images and symbols to interpret Shanghai in those days.”
The overall image of the stage art is abstract to try and give a sense of contemporary aesthetics to show the 1960s from a contemporary perspective, says Ma.
Another prominent feature of the performance is the Shanghai dialect, which is also one reason why the drama has been so successful.
With the dialect, the modern stage art, electronic music and multimedia, the stories of the three brothers unfold like an old dog-eared city map of Shanghai.
“People get a new picture of Shanghai after watching the drama,” says Ma.