The prince oflanling: Modern Masks
This year marks the 110th anniversary of the introduction of European drama to China. Since the early 20th Century when Chinese playwrights began using drama as a tool to save the country and its people, the art form has closely linked to China’s reality and exerted great influence on the country’s politics and social life.
The anniversary has provided considerable food for thought in China, a big country with a profound theatrical tradition. Across decades, the country has seamlessly connected the imported art to its own traditional theater and cultural language environment. Many modern theater artists including Jiao Juyin (1905- 1975), Ouyang Yuqian (1889-1962) and Cao Yu (1910-1996) worked hard to devise the perfect fusion of Eastern and Western styles for their own artistic creations since the 1930s when Chinese dramatist Zhang Geng (1911-2003) proposed the idea of “drama nationalization.” That tradition continues to this day.
Wang Xiaoying, vice president of the Chinese Dramatists Association and a famous director at the National Theatre Company of China, hopes to further explore the possibility of “drama nationalization” based on the achievements of oldergeneration artists.
“It’s not practical to continue defining drama as an ‘import’ after it has been growing in China for 110 years,” asserts Wang. “China still has a long way to nationalize its drama compared to Japan and South Korea, which have perfectly integrated their own cultures into the art.”
Inspired by Japan and South Korea, Wang formulated the concept of “modern expression of Chinese images.”
“Over the last decade, I have been searching for a modern stage image of the structure of Chinese culture, which I call the ‘modern expression of Chinese images,’” he explains. His theory is evidenced in his plays ranging from Man and Wilderness (2006), an original drama about the “educated youth” generation, and The Story of Overlord (2007), a modern drama with historical themes, to The Tragedy of King Richard the Third (2012), a Chinese version of the Shakespeare play, and Fu Sheng (2014), another period piece.
On July 11, 2017, The Prince of Lanling, an original play directed by Wang Xiaoying, premiered at the National Theatre of China. It presents the new exploration of his directorial art guided by the theory of “modern expression of Chinese images” as well as his insight about the “nationalization of drama” in China over the last dozen or so years.
“I want to recreate the aesthetic rhythm of traditional Chinese theatrical flavor with details of storytelling, characterization, emotional expression and delivery of ideas,” he explains.
The legendary story centers on Prince Lanling, a famous general of the Northern Qi (550-577) period of the Northern and Southern Dynasties (420-581). The real historical figure is depicted as a delicate prince who disguises himself as an effeminate man after witnessing the assassination of his father. With focus on extremes of human nature, such as tenderness versus toughness represented by a sheep and wolf in a dualistic tone of artistic symbolism, it creates a modern version of the “soul and mask” fable.
“The nationalization of drama in China is not about simply copying external form,” comments Song Baozhen, deputy director and researcher from the Chinese National Academy of Arts. “Rather, it digs deeper into cultural values and significance, which can be widely appreciated and accepted by Chinese audiences in terms of narration, forms of expression and the charm and strength of characters. The Prince of Lanling fits the bill.”