Chinese Hamlet dreams up a dark future
The Beijing Li Liuyi Theatre Studio adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, staged last weekend as part of Hong Kong Arts Festival, uses a familiar plot device. It’s the classic Alice-in-Wonderland trope in which the series of events in a story are revealed at the end to have taken place inside the protagonist’s head.
Hong Kong’s Shakespeare aficionados might remember the Tang Shu-wing Theatre Studio production of Macbeth put on last September. Halfway through in that adaptation the actors playing Macbeth and his wife switched roles. The lead actor Andy Ng, dressed in a shimmering red gown and sparkling jewelry as Lady Macbeth, shot coy glances at the banquet guests while his partner, Lai Yuk-ching, played a peremptory Macbeth in a business suit. The effect, though bizarre, made total sense, as it is Lady Macbeth who comes across as the more politically ambitious and controlling of the two in Shakespeare’s play — the one who wears the pants in the house.
However, the swapping of genders also introduced a degree of comedy, helping to take the edge off the heavy dose of murder and intrigue in one of Shakespeare’s most blood-spattered plays, allowing the audience to see the ludicrous side of “vaulting ambition”.
Like Tang Shu-wing’s Macbeth, Li Liuyi’s Hamlet also takes place in the protagonist’s imagination. The cue is in Shakespeare’s text itself. (Hamlet: Methinks I see my father. / Horatio: Where, my lord? / Hamlet: In my mind’s eye, Horatio.) In Li’s vision, the extraordinary sequence of events in which Hamlet’s father, the king of Denmark, gets killed by his uncle who then assumes the throne and marries his mother, followed by Hamlet falling out with his girlfriend, killing her father by mistake as a result of which she goes mad with grief and dies, as does almost every other character, could all be a figment of fantasy — a yarn spun by Hamlet’s hyper-active brain.
In the last scene Li’s Hamlet watches the other characters gradually disappear into the background while he alone remains on stage to deliver the pivotal “To be or not to be” speech. It is positioned like a post-performance critical commentary in which Hamlet pitches the existential question at the play’s core — whether to try and fix the woes of the world or suffer in silence — directly at the audience.
Having the same actor (Lu Fang) play both Hamlet’s mother, Queen Gertrude, and his love interest, Ophelia, seems reasonable. Hamlet’s obsessive rage at his mother for marrying his uncle has long since been interpreted as a venting of an Oedipus complex. Hence the figures of mother and girlfriend getting fused in his subconscious sounds plausible. But I’m not sure about the logic behind Pu Cunxin playing both Hamlet’s uncle and his father’s ghost — i.e. the murderer and the murdered. Was this done to suggest that Hamlet’s late father, the former king, may not necessarily be a paragon of virtue as compared to the current incumbent, as Hamlet would have us believe?
Hu Jun, the hero of several Chinese films, had an obvious stage presence as the brooding Prince Hamlet. Assuming the idea was to tone down facial expressions to show the contrast between Hamlet’s understated, internalized grief and Ophelia’s brother Laertes’s (Jing Hao) well-articulated fury, both actors delivered.
Most of the action takes place on a stage within a stage — a huge revolving disc with a lit circumference which tilts from side to side to indicate the chaotic state of Denmark. However, the giant metallic mesh suspended on the stage and slowly moving from side to side — probably meant to create a cosmic effect — was more of a distraction rather than adding a layer of meaning to the play.