Mr. Lao She's unfinished posthumous work, "Under the Red Flag" is coming home

　　"Under the Red Flag" is Mr. Lao She's unfinished posthumous work, written from the end of 1961 to 1962, with about 80,000 words.

The novel is not finished.

Mr. So Zhi once sighed: "If Mr. is still alive, how many good works he will write! If the climate at that time allows him to write more calmly, he can almost write a "Dream of Red Mansions". "." In 1984, at the suggestion of Teacher Shizhi, Li Longyun began to adapt "Under the Red Flag" into a drama.

In the meantime, after several setbacks.

In 1999, on the 100th anniversary of Mr. Lao She's birth, Li Longyun finally completed the script.

Due to various reasons, at that time, Beijing Renyi was unable to rehearse the play.

In 2000, the Shanghai Dramatic Art Center staged the play for the first time (directed by Cha Lifang).

At the beginning of the new year in 2023, Feng Yuanzheng and Yan Rui, co-directors, finally staged the play on the stage of the Beijing People's Art Theater.

"Under the Red Flag" has gone through hardships and finally returned home.

　　Li Longyun's Script: The Difficulty of Adapting Lao She's Novels

　　Li Longyun's "There Is Such a Small Courtyard" and "Xiaojing Hutong" inherit the aesthetic spirit of Mr. Lao She's "Beijing-style drama". He is a poetic playwright and a playwright with a sense of social responsibility. He does not Satisfied with "Right Under the Red Flag", he later created the second "State Affairs" and the third "World Affairs" drama about Beijing's "Gengzi's Difficulty", which are collectively called the "Trilogy of the Heavenly Dynasty".

Beijing Renyi's performance of "Under the Red Flag" this time made some deletions to Li Longyun's script, and appropriated some plots from "National Affairs" and "World Affairs". Overall, it is appropriate.

　　There are two difficulties in adapting "Under the Red Flag":

　　One is to use the original novel as the basis and continue and rewrite the unfinished plots and characters in the novel with an appropriate drama structure and form.

In terms of grasping the language of the characters, shaping the image of the characters, and depicting the customs of Beijing in the late Qing Dynasty, Li Longyun is quite a true biography of Mr. Lao She. In addition to relatively complete retention of the main characters in the original work, Li Longyun also creatively continued to write some characters and The plot is very exciting in many places: For example, in the play, Bo Shengzhi, who traded his wife for a pair of blue aconite pigeons, after his wife hanged himself, went to bury her generously to save face, and kept saying: "We have never done anything wrong to her!" It is extremely absurd; another example is that the elder brother-in-law Duofu imitated Yue Fei and wanted to tattoo "serve the country with loyalty" on his back, and so on.

"Under the Red Flag" is an autobiographical novel by Mr. Lao She, and the narrator of the novel is "I"——Lao She.

When Li Longyun adapted the drama, he also let Mr. Lao She appear on the stage and became the narrator of the whole drama, which skillfully solved the problem of drama structure.

However, everyone knows that in 1966, Mr. Lao She threw himself into Taiping Lake and died, leaving an unfinished posthumous work.

Therefore, as a narrator, Mr. Lao She is only a narrator in half the sense, and the other half is the Lao She imagined by the playwright Li Longyun, and he is also the Lao She who wants to talk in the real cultural context. It is not a complete narrative. By.

As the second author, Li Longyun, a playwright, cannot completely look back on his family history from the standpoint of Mr. Lao She before his death. The emotion of the fate of the nation and the people.

In my opinion, the narrative stance in the play is not thorough, and this fictional Mr. Lao She’s narrative stance also leads to some problems in the expression of the play’s theme.

　　The second difficulty in adapting "Under the Red Flag" is: what is the theme of the play?

What kind of historical perspective is used to describe the Boxer Movement, the Gengzi Change, and the political and cultural conflicts between the East and the West since the late Qing Dynasty involved in the play?

In 1960, Mr. Lao She wrote a drama "Shenquan", which affirmed the Boxer Movement with the politically correct concept at that time.

Li Longyun is different from Mr. Lao She in "Trilogy of the Kingdom of Heaven". He examines the ignorance and backwardness of the national character from the standpoint of enlightenment under the affirmative premise.

Li Longyun very cleverly connected the play of "fighting eyes" between the elder sister, mother-in-law and aunt in the family described by Lao She with the public's discussion on the political struggle in the palace before the fall of Beijing during the Gengzi period (scene 9), and brought the two old ladies together. The ignorance of the wife's "fighting mind" is compared with the political struggle between the Empress Dowager Cixi and Emperor Guangxu in the court, and the group ignorance from the royal family to the people is written, and the deformity and backwardness of the people's character in the pre-modern cultural context are criticized.

However, Li Longyun's Enlightenment thoughts are hazy and incomplete, which also leads to some deviations in his grasp of grand historical narratives.

For example, in the scene where Lao She's father died in battle at the "Nanhengyu" grain store, his father said to Fu Hai's second brother: I have always been ordered by others all my life, and I have never tasted what it is like to order others.

If the emperor got into my step, he was about to die, what should he say to the ministers?

He must have said: Fuhai!

Kneel down!

This stroke feels awkward and strange.

How could a father who had been a good man all his life want to be the emperor to order others before he died?

This stroke not only weakened the image of the father as an ordinary low-level citizen, but also compromised the ideological nature of the play.

In addition, the last scene in the play is about Master Langyue of Baoguo Temple leading the monks to die for the country, which is also very awkwardly written.

It is a pity that the criticism of the ignorant national consciousness has been diluted by the inflated group passion.

　　Rehearsal of Beijing People's Art: Innovation and Reflection in Tradition Inheritance

　　The rehearsal of "Under the Red Flag" by Beijing Renyi is facing multiple challenges.

In the past three years, the epidemic has come and gone, whether it is a state-of-the-art national theater like Beijing Renyi, or large and small private theaters, theater people have suffered a lot.

After the premiere performance, Dean Feng Yuanzheng stepped onto the stage excitedly and said to the audience: This is the first sold-out performance of Beijing People's Art Center in three years.

On the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the establishment of the Academy, it is a commendable move to have the courage to rehearse "Under the Red Flag", and to have the courage to think about the present and look forward to the future on the basis of Mr. Lao She's original work.

　　With red roofs and golden glazed tiles, teams of people in the capital dressed in late Qing costumes pass by like foreign films... The stage designer (Chang Jiang) freely chose the unique visual images of Beijing. to create stage space.

With the change of time and space, the scenery on the roof changes into city walls, arch bridges... Such a stage design laid the foundation for the poetic pursuit of the whole performance.

Mr. Lao She played by Pu Cunxin is quite similar. He has a good grasp of Mr. Lao She's unspeakable mentality when he wrote "Under the Red Flag".

It is very rare that a group of young and middle-aged actors from Beijing Renyi took on this very difficult play.

Their performances incorporate the rhythm, rhythm, and figure of some Chinese operas, and inherit the style of the Renyi Drama School.

For example, Duo Fu imitated the scene in which Yue Fei got the tattoo on his back. With the beating of gongs and drums, the actors used opera performance methods to brilliantly express the absurd comic connotation behind the characters' behavior.

　　Mr. Jiao Juyin creatively integrated the artistic spirit and formal means of Chinese opera with Western drama, applied the aesthetic pursuit of traditional Chinese poetics to stage practice, and created the Beijing Renyi Drama School.

The rehearsal of "Under the Red Flag" is of course the inheritance of the Beijing People's Art Theater School, and in the inheritance, there is also the pursuit of innovation.

This sense of innovation is particularly rare.

In my opinion, this is firstly based on the director and actors' excavation of the era connotation of "Under the Red Flag".

On the basis of respecting Mr. Li Longyun's adaptation, the two directors prudently cut and appropriated, incorporating their thinking about the history of the late Qing Dynasty.

　　For the audience, the event of Beijing People's Arts rehearsing "Under the Red Flag" itself determines the audience's aesthetic expectations for the nostalgia of the "Beijing flavor" culture.

However, if it's just "nostalgia", it's just a review of Beijing's past cultural landscape, city customs, and traditional culture, and it's just a play on the "accent" of old Beijing people's art, which is of little significance.

Mr. Acheng said: "Novels are afraid of having an accent...a writer's 'style', imitators flock to imitate it, dissolve it into an 'accent', and pull it down." The same is true for drama.

Russian-American scholar Svetlana Boym pointed out in "The Future of Nostalgia" that there are two types of nostalgia: restorative and reflective.

Restorative nostalgia emphasizes returning home and returning to the old.

Reflective nostalgia is mostly limited to nostalgia itself, and does not shy away from the contradictions of modernity. In the best sense, reflective nostalgia can pose some ethical and creative challenges.

In my opinion, the two directors, Feng Yuanzheng and Yan Rui, both reflect on the history of the era described by Lao She and Li Longyun, as well as on the artistic tradition of Beijing Renyi.

　　At the beginning of the new year in 2023, the rehearsal of "Under the Red Flag" has taken a steady step forward.

　　Peng Tao is a professor at the Central Academy of Drama and the president of the China Chapter of the International Association of Theater Critics (IATC).

　　Beijing Daily Peng Tao

　　beijing daily