The Director of the Play *Fayuan Temple, Beijing* Says Her Plays Are All About Grand Things | 100 People With Ideas
The theater director behind *The Field of Life and Death*, *Green Snake*, and *Fayuan Temple, Beijing* files herself under "mainstream," a word she says stands for a standard of aesthetics and a standard of content. But things may be more complicated than that.
The theater director behind The Field of Life and Death 《生死场》, Green Snake 《青蛇》, and Fayuan Temple, Beijing 《北京法源寺》 files herself under "mainstream," a word she says stands for a standard of aesthetics and a standard of content. But things may be more complicated than that.
By the fourth full-cast rehearsal of Fayuan Temple, Beijing, the weight on Tian Qinxin's shoulders seemed to have grown heavier.
This time she was going after the title of "theater master." In a dark blue down jacket and a pair of baggy canvas trousers, she chain-smoked in the rehearsal hall of the National Theatre of China. She had all but given up on the idea before; now, she said, she planned to try again.
She had a subject big enough to be a challenge: the Hundred Days' Reform, the attempt to cure a late-Qing dynasty already deep in sickness. Most of the historical details are disputed, and, true to habit, Tian had to check them one by one and work out how the events connected. She also likes to draw comparisons with the present, so she had to work out how to tell the story plainly, get it past the censors, and still make people sit up.
The project came with a guarantee of sorts: Li Ao, who wrote the original novel. In 2012, Tian's play Unrivaled Splendor 《风华绝代》 was staged in Taipei. Li Ao — an intellectual with no patience for popular taste, who had once attacked the talk show Kangsi Coming 《康熙来了》 — watched it and judged her skill considerable. He asked whether she was interested in his own work, and, to stiffen her nerve, added: "I've seen countless people in my life, and I think you can do it."
Writing the script took two years in the end. To get "imperial power, and a Qing court in constant dread" onto the page, Tian rented a room on East Chang'an Avenue where the window looked down on the Forbidden City. "On days without smog, you got up in the morning and could see the golden rooftops."
The only thing unsettled was this: who, exactly, decides who gets called a "theater master"?
Could it be the box office? Since 2001, the theater market has answered Tian Qinxin warmly. The first run of her play Wild Storm 《狂飙》 took 1 million yuan in 2001. In 2002, a promoter bought out the first ten performances of Speak Human to Humans 《见人说人话》 for 1 million yuan, something the theater world had not seen before. By 2007, six performances of Red Rose, White Rose at the National Centre for the Performing Arts sold 3.2 million yuan in tickets. In 2011, the national tour of Four Generations Under One Roof took more than 10 million yuan. In 2012, a "Chinese performing arts box office ranking" put Tian at the top of its "theater director" list with 54.26 million yuan in total ticket sales.
Her newest play, Fayuan Temple, Beijing, opened in Beijing a month ago. The first run of 12 performances sold out fast and the response was strong, so the producer, the National Theatre of China, added an unplanned second tour starting this January.
Her peer Meng Jinghui once offered an analysis of the theater box office: traditional plays sell better. "If you say you're conservative, people will say, well, it looks great, it's got a strong storyline, it's full of human feeling, the structure — setup, development, twist, resolution — is beautifully done."
In a way, that is exactly what Tian's plays are. Audiences enjoy this kind of theater: a traditional realist story with a texture they already know, told by Tian in a way that feels entirely new — every character sharply drawn, the emotion hot, the detail thick, and mainstream enough.
Fayuan Temple, Beijing had its first run in the mid-sized, 1,000-seat theater at the Tianqiao Performing Arts Center. The set was grand, with several layers of backdrop — a Buddhist hall, an imperial court — and curtains rising and falling overhead, backed by elaborate lighting and sound. The cast was large too: "Empress Dowager Cixi," "Emperor Guangxu," "Tan Sitong," and "Li Hongzhang" were played by Xi Meijuan, Zhou Jie, Jia Yiping, and Huang Xiaoli, the father of the actor Huang Lei.
Onstage, Tian used a device common in theater, the shift of time and place. As the "Six Gentlemen of the Hundred Days' Reform" were in the middle of a discussion, the action would stop, and a man in official robes with a slippery look on his face would appear. The "Six Gentlemen" would turn to the audience and remark, "The historical record says one of Yuan Shikai's subordinates was also present." After some argument, the "subordinate" would vanish from the stage. A clever piece of staging, and easy for the audience to read.
"I'm a genius, in a certain sense." That is how Tian once described her own grasp of theater. She has also described that grasp as a rather dramatic revelation: "The night before last, my head was like a stir-fry — I couldn't make sense of anything. Then I woke at five the next morning, a particularly clear morning, pitch dark. I sat up in bed and suddenly it was all there: the characters' entrances, how they were arranged, the whole stage picture."
When it comes to performance, Tian has come to see that too much theatricality does not go down well. "Don't play it up. Stay relaxed, but not slack," she tells her actors in rehearsal. Actors, film and television stars included, are willing to follow her for training they cannot get elsewhere; they, in turn, are the guarantee at the box office. Qin Hailu appeared in Tian's Red Rose, White Rose and Green Snake. She has said of Tian that she can make an actor take off the mask: "It opened up more than one play for me. It opened up my life."
The fans who follow Tian Qinxin are an unusual crowd, and they carry more weight in the system that decides who counts as a "theater master."
The screenwriter Zhao Zhao watched Fayuan Temple, Beijing and wrote on Weibo: "I didn't expect to well up over a play so preoccupied with the fate of the nation. Serious drama, big sweeping strokes, a classic from the National Theatre." Tian reposted it, plainly agreeing, and was pleased to have the intellectuals' applause.
Intellectuals are still the mainstream audience for theater; Tian believes this old saying. She also believes intellectuals like watching mainstream plays. If you had to compare the makers of such theater to film directors, they would be Sam Mendes, Luc Besson, Steven Spielberg, Ang Lee, Akira Kurosawa. "That's what mainstream means to me: able to direct blockbusters, but still warm, both commercial and humane, both beautiful and fantastical."
Because she feels strongly about traditional Chinese culture, though, the humanity and the beauty in her plays carry Tian's own mark. She sees herself as having something in common with Lao She: both Beijingers, both of the Plain Red Banner of the Manchu Eight Banners, both having learned from old Beijing a cultural "way of living," so that their speech carries the stamp of orthodoxy and of elites. As a child Tian went to opera school and rode her bicycle all over the old walled city to watch performances — the music and dance of the pre-Qin era, the "hundred entertainments" of the Han, the canjun plays of the Tang, the storytelling scripts of the Song, the zaju drama of the Yuan, the Kunqu of the Ming, and the Peking opera that appeared some 200 years ago under the Qing. She watched more than 360 regional opera forms in all.
She even hopes, in a somewhat "nationalist" way, to find traces of Chinese culture everywhere in Western culture. German expressionist theater, popular today, pushes exaggeration to the limit and is dirty and violent — Chinese opera has that too, Tian says. "The gong strikes and the eyes lock straight onto each other. It's strange. That sense of form, that frenzy of posture, that charisma and force in the image: we have all of it." She used the approach in Fayuan Temple, Beijing, and credited the inspiration to traditional culture.
Traditional culture is no longer intact, but it has left traces, and they show up most clearly in how audiences watch — which is also what guarantees ticket sales for Tian's plays. When she told, in Green Snake, a story of the three realms and their cycles, where "demons want to become human and humans want to become Buddhas," audiences raised on myths like Journey to the West, Legend of the White Snake, and The Fairy Couple had no trouble following it, and grew curious about the new version.
And intellectuals who are culturally conservative yet critical of the present can, from another angle, genuinely find more to answer to in Tian's plays. They want to see fortunes rise and crash against a cruel, disordered age, and after the curtain falls, to look back and ask where history is going.
Tian gives them exactly that. "You walk out of the theater not knowing what day it is, feeling burned up inside, unable to find your bearings." That is how Dai Jinhua once described The Field of Life and Death. A professor at Peking University, well known in film criticism and gender studies, she is now a fan of Tian's work too.
Across the theater market as a whole, though, things may already be changing. More and more young people are keen on white-collar theater and avant-garde theater, and they make up a growing share of the audience. Watching a mainstream play that leans hard on ideas and feels a little middle-aged is not, to them, what makes a theater worth going to.
A student named Lu Sa had a reaction entirely unlike Dai Jinhua's: Tian's 2015 revival of The Field of Life and Death was the play that disappointed him most. "The Field of Life and Death treats 'patriotism' as the basic principle behind what the characters do, and ignores the calculation, the struggle, the fear and everything else inside them," he wrote in "The 2015 Theater Performances I Liked Least," a survey run by "Theater Ferris Wheel." "Is the creator interested in the human nature this event reveals, or only in the template of the event itself?"
Bai Ke, also a student, put Fayuan Temple, Beijing on his own list of the plays he liked least in 2015, on the grounds that "the creator seems to try to convey a lot of deep, weighty things by having the lines lecture the audience outright. The result is neither deep nor moving — in fact it isn't engaging at all, and it has been like chewing wax from the first minute."
Yet that opening, the one like chewing wax, is what Tian spent a long time working over with her actors at a rehearsal in late November. She stood up from behind her chair and took stagey, deliberate steps, first performing a rough, "soldierly" version of the line, then the correct one: "Indeed. The court towers above; the mortal world below is the stage. Clang — tsi!" Without the gong to go with it, it would sound dull; this is the way of performing it that Tian calls "culture."
But there is no denying that another thing also called "culture" shapes mainstream theater just as much: Tian and her company care just as much about the official verdict on the play. That day, an administrator from the National Theatre of China reminded the actors that, because of an official speech on literature and art work given in October 2014, this production carried special meaning.
Tian had digested that speech. At one rehearsal, sounding like a director rallying a cast before curtain, she told the actors that theater companies all over the country "are all waiting for a peak work like this one" to appear. About half an hour passed before she got to the play itself. "Mainstream isn't the same as the official 'main melody,'" Tian said later, in an interview with us, to clear the point up. "Mainstream is a standard of aesthetics, a standard of content."
Even so, Tian's mainstream theater faces challenges. For one thing, standards of aesthetics and content in theater do not stay fixed, and her grasp of a more commercial theater market is still thin. Last year Tian's own studio fully financed the play Hero, 24 Hours 《英雄 24 小时》, directed by a young director with Tian as producer. The promoters' response was close to silence.
Facing a cold reception rare in her career, Tian has kept saying this was the play she wanted to make. It exposed her weak spot: a "Chinese hero" theme rooted in traditional culture does not suit young audiences' tastes, and once she steps away from classic texts, her judgment as an original creator is still shaky.
Tian has drifted before on the question of going commercial. At first she disliked the idea. She recalls staging her first play, Cutting Off the Wrist 《断腕》, in 1999 — borrowing money, negotiating deals — and remembers only the hardship. After she joined the National Theatre of China, staging The Field of Life and Death and Wild Storm took no thought about budget or box office at all. Tian tried picking up work from private promoters again, but she now looks back on that stretch as the most confused of her life, full of shoddy, hurried work. She would rather stay put at the National Theatre of China. She does not talk about the constraints that come with it, and calls it simply "a place that keeps artists alive."
Meng Jinghui, another director who came out of the National Theatre of China, took a completely different road. In 1999 he began making the experimental play Rhinoceros in Love through his own studio. His experimental theater went on to develop a distinct style, winning loyal audiences and heavy ticket sales in small houses.
Of this peer, Tian once said: "Meng Jinghui made experimental theater, and after doing it for a while and gaining some influence, he turned into an opportunist. Thinking about the audience's tastes and preferences."
Meng did not answer the criticism directly. But in an interview with QDaily last year, he said national theater companies and small companies "may have their own pursuits too, but don't really know what it is they're pursuing" — and that, he said, is where he differs from them.
Tian believes she does know. The first thing she is clear about is that plays made to please urban audiences, dwelling on small private feelings, are bound to sit some distance from a master's work. "My theatrical expression goes beyond emotional expression," Tian said; otherwise it would be too vulgar, "not like something from Tian Qinxin."
But plenty of people still remember that before she turned 26, Tian wore her hair long and dressed in white. At 26 she staged her first play, Cutting Off the Wrist. It began with a love affair that failed; Tian meant to make a play for the other person. After that she stopped liking simple love stories. She hesitated over taking on Red Rose, White Rose and Green Snake as well, and in the end lifted both into grand themes.
This woman director came to see that she had been asleep. She began looking at the world through a man's eyes — which, plainly, is another kind of mainstream. In the rehearsal hall of the National Theatre of China, talking through the play, she wears her hair in a buzz cut, unusual, and easy to lose in a crowd. The advantage of this androgynous look, Tian says, with some shrewdness, is: "Talking about the play is just talking about the play. No male actor is going to get other ideas."
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Translated from the original QDaily article. Original publication date retained.