Even before it opened, Gregory Doran’s
production was the subject of controversy. This new version of a story
sometimes (allegedly) known as “the Chinese
Hamlet” is staged with a cast of 18
of whom only three are ethnically East Asian, and they are in minor
roles. On one level the outrage at this claimed racism is specious: it
is only a few months since Doran’s African take on
Julius Caesar was widely lauded,
and the current ensemble will also present Pushkin’s
Boris Godunov and Brecht’s
Life Of Galileo, yet where are the
protests at the absence of a single Russian, German or Italian? In
terms of role allocation, it may be possible to make out a case for
some thoughtlessness; however, the point of staging this tale is its
universality.
True, the themes of loyalty, honour and duty are to an extent
peculiarly Confucian; however, the titular character’s conflict between
(filial) love and duty strikes me more keenly than Racine’s version of
similarly torn impulses in
Berenice,
currently at the Donmar. At times the dilemma increases to a Spanish
Golden Age degree of sharpness. And the magnificently downbeat final
scene, with its portrayal of human powerlessness and bewilderment in
the face of the otherworldly, could have come from Euripides… although
this story is even older. Its first recorded version dates from the 5th
century BCE, but James Fenton’s adaptation is from a 17th-century
revision of a 14th-century drama.
Fenton has a fine ear for avoiding particular linguistic registers, and
he exercises it here. His text eschews rhetoric and demotic equally,
similarly disdaining faux-chinoiserie except for a very occasional note
in the sung ballads which bracket each half of the evening. Much of the
performance, similarly, is not quite formal but also hardly
naturalistic, save for the notes which individual actors can strike.
Foremost among these are Joe Dixon as Tu’an Gu, the emperor’s cruel
chief minister who sees off his nobler rivals and aims to murder even
the infant son of his chief opponent; and Graham Turner as Cheng Ying,
a country doctor who shelters the baby and brings it up as his own son…
even after Tu’an Gu adopts the boy to be raised at court. This
generates the Orphan’s exquisite dilemma: it is his duty to kill one of
his “fathers”, and even the man he believes to be his natural father
has lied to him all his life. It is a classic dramatic conflict, and
one which has no need of a seal of authenticity in the form of an
approved quota of Oriental performers.
Written for the Financial
Times.