Play captures sights and sounds of old Shanghai
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E-mail China Daily, May 17, 2013
Shanghai theater critics have lauded the premiere of The Eternal Snow Beauty, praising it for reviving the tradition of Shanghai dialect theater.
The Eternal Snow Beauty tells the story of a glamorous woman in a 1940s Shanghai dance hall. It is presented mainly in the Shanghai dialect, but there are also colloquial expressions from Suzhou, Ningbo, Yangzhou and pidgin English.
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The Eternal Snow Beauty, adapted from Taiwan writer Pai Hsien-yung's novel, is about a Shanghai belle in the 1940s. [China Daily] |
The colorful language evokes the time when Shanghai was an open harbor and a melting pot of different cultures, says Zhu Guang, a critic with Xinmin Evening News.
Zhu says the production is a milestone in the city's theater scene. Traditional Shanghai dialect theater was dormant in the 1940s, and The Eternal Snow Beauty has brought it back to contemporary theater.
The Eternal Snow Beauty was originally a short story by Taiwan-based writer Pai Hsien-yung from his book Taipei People, a collection of stories he wrote in the 1960s.
The play tells the story of Yin Hsueh-yen, once the belle of Shanghai's Paramount ballroom. In the late 1940s, before the fall of the Kuomintang and their flight to Taiwan, she is surrounded by admirers - high-ranking officials and rich businessmen.
Twenty years later Yin hosts an upscale mahjong gathering in her Taipei home, still the center of attention many years later.
Many of Pai's works have been adapted for the theater or screen, some repeatedly. The Eternal Snow Beauty however, is being staged for the first time.
"Forty years ago, when I wrote the story of Yin Hsueh-yen, I never expected she would come back to Shanghai ever again," Pai says at the play's premiere at Shanghai Culture Square on May 4.
The play's first run, from May 4 to 16, sold out. It will tour Beijing, Hong Kong and Taiwan. "It's definitely not meant for the Yangtze Delta market only," says Xu Jun, director of the play.
The highlight of the production is the Shanghai dialect, says Ye Changhai, a professor of Shanghai Theater Academy.
Productions in Beijing and Tianjin use local dialects, and Cantonese plays are staged in Hong Kong and Guangzhou, but Shanghai has fallen behind in this field.
Maestro Huang Zuolin (1906-94) directed plays in Shanghai dialect in the 1940s, but Shanghai dialect has disappeared from China's formal theater scene since then, says director Xu.
Xu directed a Shaoxing Opera adaptation of Pai's novella Sister Yu-qing a few years ago. Encouraged by the success of that production, Pai authorized Xu to adapt The Eternal Snow Beauty.
It was Xu who came upon the idea to present it in Shanghai dialect.
Determined to present authentic Shanghai culture in all its glamor, Xu wanted his production of The Eternal Snow Beauty to be elegant, modern and exquisite.
"Shanghai dialect was slightly different at the time of the story - the vocabulary and pronunciation are not exactly the same as we are familiar with. The actors have to spend lots of time practicing their diction."
In the play, the ballroom doorman speaks the Ningbo dialect, the housemaid greets the guest in the Suzhou dialect, and a fortune-teller speaks in the rough northern Jiangsu dialect.
"The dialect livens up the character, enriches the theater performance and immediately makes the play vivid," Zhu, the critic, says.
"The ballroom manager, for example, speaks the language of lower class people working in high society - very convincingly, with the occasional dip of a word in pidgin English."
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