FEATURE: Chinese Kunqu Opera adds confusion to Japanese play

Asian Political News, August 5, 2002

BEIJING, Aug. 1 Kyodo

The confusion and darkness of Chinese director Fang Tong's play adaptation of Akira Kurosawa's ''Rashomon'' stems less from the muse of the legendary Japanese film director than from the somber writings of another giant of the Japanese arts.

Ryunosuke Akutagawa's beautiful but macabre prose serves as the main inspiration for Fang's experimental play, now baffling audiences in the capital with its incorporation of ancient Kunqu Chinese opera and its questioning of the way people perceive reality.

Akutagawa is famous for his insightful novellas, mostly written during the 10-year period before he killed himself with an overdose of pills at the age of 35 in 1927.

Akutagawa, abandoned by his father after the death of his insane mother, wrote in his suicide note: ''Such voluntary death must give us peace, if not happiness. Now that I am ready, I find nature more beautiful than ever, paradoxical as this may sound.''

Kurosawa drew on two of Akutagawa's short stories, ''Rashomon'' and ''In the Grove'' in making his 1950 breakthrough ''Rashomon,'' which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 1951.

Drawing from such a dark wellspring, Fang's play is hardly likely to provide for frivolous entertainment, even though he does try and lighten the mood with a little slapstick and Chinese pop music references.

The story revolves around the rape of a woman by a gang of armed thugs as her samurai husband watches on helplessly while tied to a tree. A debate between a group of people on the cause of the samurai's subsequent death forms the centerpiece of Kurosawa's film.

Fang, who uses this debate to highlight some of the bigger issues in life, does not mind if the audience leaves his play feeling confused.

''The play is designed to show the difficulties in understanding what is real in the world, and the way people perceive reality differently,'' said the 35-year-old Beijing director.

The difficulty of discerning reality is even more relevant today with the advent of virtual images along with computers and the Internet, he added.

The four-man, one-woman troupe depict confusing shifts in time and place, moving from an interrogation room where one of the robbers thought to have raped the woman is held, to the scene of the crime in the woods and then finally to one of the layers of the multitiered Buddhist hell.

Different accounts of what happened in the woods are presented to the audience, such as the possibility that the samurai chose to commit suicide or that his wife called on his captors to kill him since she was so ashamed of his failure to protect her.

One of the most interesting features of Fang's play is its incorporation of Kunqu Opera, which, gaining popularity about 600 years ago, predates the more popular Peking Opera by four decades.

Unlike the more stylized Peking Opera, performers in Kunqu Opera carry out the difficult task of singing and talking, often in high-pitched voices, at the same time as performing elegant flowing movements.

Fang has updated the archaic language of traditional Kunqu Opera with contemporary language, going as far as spicing the diction of the main robber character with commonly used expletives.

The play finishes with a depiction of Akutagawa's book ''The Spider's Thread,'' which depicts a man falling back to hell after the Buddha cuts a spider's thread acting as the man's escape to freedom after he selfishly tells those below him not to follow.

Japanese troupe member Kozo Yamada said the play is meant to leave people feeling puzzled.

''The themes of the difficulties involved in knowing what is real and what is false are particularly relevant in Chinese society today,'' said Yamada, a 32-year-old Beijing-based graduate student who plays a guard, Buddhist monk and a tree in the play.

''Many Chinese people are experiencing difficulties in catching up with rapid changes during the past 20 years. They don't know what is good and what is bad,'' he added.

While Fang's play version of ''Rashomon'' is indeed depressing and confusing, it succeeds in reminding us that this is an inescapable if undesirable part of life, while also warning people not to jump to conclusions based on their own personal observations.