19 Years On, That Play Is Still Avant-Garde, and Its Director Lin Zhaohua Is Still Cool in Very Few Words | Interviews⑭

Avant-garde, unruly, unfiltered.

The avant-garde director Lin Zhaohua is 81 now. Sitting outdoors in Beijing, in weather close to freezing, he ordered a soda water with ice in it.

In 1998, Lin Zhaohua wove two plays — Three Sisters and Waiting for Godot — into one, and stunned the theater world.

When the play went up, Chinese intellectuals were living through one of their bleakest stretches: their hopes of building a Western-style democratic system kept being knocked down, and violent economic change was battering people's values. Peng Tao, a professor at the Central Academy of Drama, read the play's theme of "waiting" as a "classical waiting" — the belief, held under the weight of a vulgar and stifling daily life, that some ultimate value still exists, and that a better future is still on its way.

Before that, from the late 1970s on, Lin Zhaohua had directed a run of productions that challenged the conventions of traditional theater — Absolute Signal, Bus Stop, Wild Man, Uncle Doggie's Nirvana, Birdmen, Weddings and Funerals, Peking Man — and gradually earned the label "avant-garde."

Where the play came from has been told in the press many times. In 1998, Lin Zhaohua came down with shingles across his lower back, could not get out of bed, and had nothing to do there. He happened at the time to be reading Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters and Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. Both are about waiting: the three sisters wait, day after day, to go to Moscow; the two tramps wait, year after year, for a man named Godot who never comes. On a whim he decided to put the two scripts together, and out of that came Three Sisters · Waiting for Godot.

Lin Zhaohua was a vice president of the Beijing People's Art Theatre at the time, but the idea was too far ahead of the theater and it would not back him. In the end he and the stage designer Yi Liming paid out of their own pockets to put Three Sisters · Waiting for Godot on stage.

And because it was so "avant-garde," the first run sold badly: 30 scheduled performances had to be cut to 12. "We lost two Fukangs on it" was how Lin Zhaohua summed the production up. A Fukang sedan cost 180,000 yuan back then.

Lin Zhaohua seems to have picked the wrong moment. By the 1998 premiere of Three Sisters · Waiting for Godot, almost nothing was left of the avant-garde, freewheeling mood of 1980s China. Six years had passed since Deng Xiaoping's 1992 southern tour turned the country from a planned economy toward a market one. The property boom was minting new money by the day and producing countless tragedies alongside it, and the flood of people leaving the countryside for the cities was speeding up the churn in society. As China turned toward the market, it also turned secular.

"Waiting" was not a subject that drew attention in 1998, still less a problem anyone needed solved in a hurry.

On Three Sisters · Waiting for Godot, and on the inventive fusion of Chekhov and Beckett, the novelist Yu Hua offered an explanation that is not easy to parse: "We can make out the shape of waiting in almost every work of literature, though it keeps changing its form — sometimes it is a stirring theme, at other times a passage of narration, an action, or a psychological process; it can also be a detail, or a single line of verse. It lives on and on in our literature, everywhere at once. So Chekhov's waiting was not the beginning of waiting, and Lin Zhaohua's waiting will not be the end of it either."

Yu Hua was one of the few people who saw Three Sisters · Waiting for Godot and had something good to say about it. A play, he argued, should be what comes of a stage artist sprinting toward an extreme style. The Three Sisters of 1910 and the Waiting for Godot of 1951 both had that extreme style; but in 1998, such rebellion looked like very little. An extreme style, he wrote, can only be seen through the eyes of its own age.

"Lin Zhaohua's Three Sisters · Waiting for Godot may be an extreme style today — and of course it could only exist today," Yu Hua wrote in the seventh issue of Dushu magazine in 1998.

Toward any commentary on his plays, though, Lin Zhaohua's attitude has never varied: he can't be bothered to explain.

Asked why he was remounting the play in 2017, the answer came out the same way: no particular reason, he just did it.

Nineteen years have passed since Three Sisters · Waiting for Godot first went up, and the avant-garde director has gone from 62 to 81. The theater world now calls him "Big Director." You can still see in him the same avant-garde streak, the same unruliness and the same unfiltered mouth he had in the 1980s. He used a French composer's music in his own productions several times; the French Embassy phoned to demand royalties for it. He agreed on the spot, and never paid a cent.

For this remount of Three Sisters · Waiting for Godot he again picked music by a foreign composer, and his attitude hasn't moved: "We're damn lucky to get a few shows on at all — and you want damn royalties on top of that?"

He swears at reporters regularly during interviews. His staff hover around him, nerves showing, eyes on their watches, explaining to reporters that the director is far too likely to "say the wrong thing" and that they therefore have to cut interviews short — as though every extra second of interview carried enormous risk.

In front of the media now, Lin Zhaohua works hard to hand the halo and the credit to his son, Lin Xiyue. Over these 19 years Lin Xiyue has gone from actor to director. Lin Zhaohua insisted several times during the interview that "one director, one vision," that Three Sisters · Waiting for Godot was directed entirely by the younger man and that he would not interfere — yet he in fact turned up quietly at rehearsals every night to offer suggestions.

As for the play itself, nearly 20 years on, "people (the audience) walking out" is still a subject that keeps coming up.

When Three Sisters · Waiting for Godot went up in 1998, some people got out of their seats and left partway through; quite a few others sat there wiping their eyes. Today's theater market is more mainstream, but it is the smaller, more niche era that Lin Xiyue misses.

Plenty of people "have to say something nice about the audience so as not to offend anyone." Lin Zhaohua has no use for popular approval. "Almost nobody has both the ability to take on a difficult undertaking and the knack for pleasing the crowd," he wrote in a personal essay in 1998. On audiences walking out: "Let them walk, it's fine. If they don't want to watch, they can go," he said.

Q: QDaily

Lin: Lin Zhaohua

Q: Where did the idea of combining Three Sisters and Waiting for Godot come from?

Lin: I thought putting the two plays together would be interesting, and it wasn't deliberate, it was a sudden whim. I was ill, couldn't get out of bed, it had wrapped around onto my leg. I was restless. Then it occurred to me — around that time I'd read Three Sisters and I'd read Waiting for Godot, and hey, the two of them sat well together. Great ideas, themes — I never thought about any of that.

Some people didn't follow the play back then, but I followed the money I lost perfectly well: the two of us (stage designer Yi Liming) each lost a Fukang. Before a show you raise money, rent the theater, and whatever the first run costs you have to hand over up front. That's how we lost two Fukangs.

Q: Theater has become more mainstream, but this play's starting point is still niche. Are you worried more people will walk out this time?

Lin: Let them walk, it's fine. If they don't want to watch, they can go. Niche or mainstream isn't in our hands. I don't know the box office, I'm not worried about the box office at all, losing money or making money doesn't have much to do with me. I'm just waiting to go to Shanghai and have a Western meal.

Q: In November, people queued overnight for tickets to The Cornbread Guild Hall (《窝头会馆》), which you directed — but your studio's productions aren't always this popular.

Lin: I don't know either — why the hell is it that the moment the studio puts on a play, the box office goes bad? The Cornbread Guild Hall was commissioned as a "main melody" piece (for the 60th anniversary of the founding of the PRC); it was the first production President Zhang took hold of when he got to the theater. Those main-melody lines — I get sick of them just hearing them. Can you say it faster? Direct it strictly by the main-melody playbook and it's no fun at all.

Q: In the 1998 production of Three Sisters · Waiting for Godot, there was a large pool of water in the middle of the stage. How do you see the relationship between form and what a play carries?

Lin: First of all, a play can't do without form. That's exactly what I admire so much in Picasso: every one of his works has a form, a frame, sitting right there. Professors at the drama academy are always saying "formalism" — cut the bullshit, without form there's no art, form itself is content. With Three Sisters · Waiting for Godot, you set the form down, fit the play inside it, and it's done. The director doesn't have to work that hard; you just say the lines clearly. Take The Cornbread Guild Hall — the hardest part there is the realistic set: the second an actor moves, the whole thing falls apart.

Three Sisters · Waiting for Godot is an interwoven form. The three sisters wait to go to Moscow, those two lads wait and nothing comes of it, and I pulled "waiting" out of both. The lines were no trouble at all: this bit goes here, here are the three sisters, put Godot there, and interweave them. I took the two scripts and slotted them together, and that was that.

Q: Directing the theme of "waiting" in the 1990s and directing it now — do you read the two waitings differently?

Lin: Waiting is always there, there's no difference. Right now I'm waiting for the show to go well, waiting for their box office to be decent; good box office means we recoup more. It's all waiting.

Q: Director Lin Xiyue said that when he first saw the play in 1998 he found it "dull," and that this remount is meant to fix that.

Lin: He can understand it however he likes. At home we don't talk about theater at all, we never discuss which plays are good. Far too tiring.

The ones directing now are Lin Xiyue and Cui Yongping. You direct it, I won't give my opinion. Creation is personal; frequent disagreements are fine, however they direct it is how it goes. One director, one vision — forcing my understanding on you doesn't work. I'm not the director of this play, truly not. It's mainly these few young people.

Q: Zhang Ruoyun has taken over the role Pu Cunxin played in 1998. How do you see the difference between the two of them?

Lin: I refuse to answer that question. Reporters ask it constantly. Actors can't be compared. Pu Cunxin is Pu Cunxin, Zhang Ruoyun is Zhang Ruoyun. You can't compare them like that.

There's a reason a person becomes a star. Directing Zhang Ruoyun took no effort: he goes up, stands there, says his lines, and you barely need to adjust anything. A star is a star. I honestly haven't watched his TV shows.

I had no expectations of this production. I don't even know how I ended up on it — I ran into him by chance, had tea with him. I noticed his look and his voice were both good, and he's quite famous, and he was willing to act, so why not ask him to do the play?

Q: Plenty of stars who did theater before they made their names won't come back to it.

Lin: Once you're a star, who wants to go back to the stage? Look at all the stars — who's willing to come back? A star can make money and is free; who wants to come back for rehearsals? For one thing there's the pay: rehearsal fees are tiny, performance fees are tiny, and you have to commit to the run, which holds up a lot of TV work. For a star, joining a stage production is a sacrifice in itself. And it's not about the director or the studio — who the hell knows who you are as a director? Who knows what your studio does?

Q: When you're directing, what do you ask of your actors?

Lin: I think it's enough if the actor says the lines well.

Performance is always at the center, but performing the Stanislavski way — I find that dull. Traditional Chinese opera is better. In opera the performer creates everything: the bearing, the language, the eyes. Very few Chinese theater actors like Chinese opera, and that's the biggest problem. The aesthetics of Chinese opera really are superb, and they haven't yet tasted what it's good for.

They look down on traditional Chinese opera because spoken drama came from Europe, was learned from Europe; the education at the Central Academy of Drama is the same, all Russia, all Europe — the contempt starts with the education. Whatever else is wrong with Chinese theater education, it doesn't value the nation's traditional arts. I think traditional Chinese art should be studied — painting, opera, all of it. China has basically had no good theater for years now. It's lacking, genuinely lacking. There's only one way out: stage the classics.

I'm not saying we should collaborate with people from the opera world. I mean it's a matter of aesthetic outlook. Someone with an opera aesthetic performs in a way that is absolutely different from Stanislavski.

Q: Is there anything you'd like to remount now, or stage for the first time?

Lin: There's nothing from before that I want to direct again. I'm thinking about scripts. What I really want now is to direct something modern, a play that reflects contemporary life.

Q: Where do you get new knowledge day to day now?

Lin: I just read the paper casually every day. Lately I've been reading Chen Danqing's Stepping Back (《退步集》) — I bought it and take it out when I have a moment. I'll tell you the truth, I read books at random, reading is a habit, I can't not do it. I read the papers aimlessly too. I'm not concerned with any particular issue right now. I mostly read scripts, and when there's a play I feel like directing I think about it a bit and that's that. I'm old, I'm not up to it.

Q: Do you feel you've regressed?

Lin: I haven't regressed, I've degenerated. That's worse than regressing.

Q: What issue are you most focused on right now?

Lin: Keeping well enough to direct something. That's it. I never think about the future of theater. The development of theater isn't mine to decide, it isn't decided by any individual's will; the state is the one that should be thinking about it. I only think about what plays I feel like directing, and that's that — but what I like is niche, personal work.

Q: You've directed so many plays — have you made mistakes?

Lin: First, I make mistakes all the time. Second, I have no grand ideals when I direct. I don't. Honestly, I really don't. I give the final theme of a play a little thought, not much — serving the people, serving politics, serving whatever… I don't have all that in my head. I think artistic creation is always for yourself. Serving anyone else is fake. It's all for yourself.

Q: Do you have any misconceptions about the world?

Lin: I haven't even got to the bottom of my misconceptions about my own damn family, never mind the world.

Q: Is there anything about society today that worries you?

Lin: First, no. Second, I don't think about it. Putting on a play is putting on a play; why think about so much else?

Cover image courtesy of Lin Zhaohua's studio.