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National Beijing Opera CompanyMay 2005 London, Sadler's Wells © Jeffery Taylor Former dancer, Critic and an Arts feature writer for the |
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“Look, here is the Broken Bridge” sings Li Shengsu as Bai Suzhen, the eponymous heroine of the Legend of the White Snake. And she goes on telling us about the dratted Bridge for roughly as long as Mimi tells us she is dying in Puccini’s La Boheme. But at least we Westerners can recognise that bit as opera. The culture shock sets in with the funny walks, falsetto voices and camp acting techniques. Here we are innocently settling down for an evening of intense and fiendishly subtle classical ritual along the lines of the Japanese Kabuki tradition when up pops pure pantomime. In fact the style of the Beijing Opera, on at the Wells last week and heading for Edinburgh and Salisbury, grew as a popular, or “common” entertainment for the masses as opposed to the dignified court recreations. It went respectable when the infamous Dowager Empress (1835-1908) invited the artists permanently into her palace to pander to her low tastes. But essentially it is a show of dance, song and spectacular acrobatics best enjoyed with a family picnic, a lot of ribaldry at the slapstick and audible comments at the expertise, or otherwise, of the actors. The action takes place accompanied by onstage musicians playing traditional instruments, the stage laid over by a thick carpet that creates an unearthly silence to the physical rough and tumble. The costumes are sensational and the story dense though usefully enlightened by surtitles. The heroine tells her husband, Xu Xian (Zhang Wei a Ken Dodd lookalike) she is “not like other girls,” actually she is an incarnation of an ancient white snake, the discovery of which understandably sends her old man off on a bender with a wicked old monk called Fa Hai (Yang Yanyi). They are finally reunited and live happily ever after thanks to the intervention of her Little Sister, the Green Snake (Huang Hua). The urge to “hiss” “boo” and “behind you” is almost irresistible.
But it all adds up to a unique combination of physical grace and beauty, Keystone Kop humour and breathtaking tumbling. Huang Hua’s dazzling expertise warding off 10 spears simultaneously hurled at her is alone worth the trip. Even without the sandwiches and lemonade.
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