Of all the experiments in bringing two different kinds of plays together in a single performance, He and She is probably the boldest yet to come to the Chinese dramatic stage. The show, which is running at the Beibingmasi Theatre in Beijing until August 5, brings together a French comedy and an errenzhuan skit, a form of theatre featuring two people in a performance that involves singing and dancing as well as dialogue that is popular in Northeast China.

Widow Ma's Inn (Ma Guafu Kaidian), the errenzhuan that constitutes the first half of the show, involves a story from the Tang Dynasty (AD 618-907).

Di Renjie (AD 630-700), a famous statesman in Chinese history, is on his way to take the imperial examination when he stays at widow Ma's inn.

Di is amazed by Ma's beauty, and the restrained Ma is also attracted by Di's elegant manners. Di expresses his love to Ma. Fearing public condemnation, Ma refuses Di. However, in her dreams, her late husband encourages her to remarry and tells her that Di is the right man. Inventing a question about poetry and taking him fresh water, Ma goes to see Di and releases her inner feelings. As they reveal their feelings for each other, Ma awakes and finds that it is all a dream. In reality she would never dare act that way.

The second half of He and She presents Heart for Two (Coeur a Deux), by French playwright Guy Foissy.

In this piece the man and woman are two factory workers from the lower classes. They meet sitting on a long bench. Their idle chatter shifts to love, and they begin to dream of their romantic future together: falling in love, getting married and having children, becoming stars and making a huge fortune, and even death... But they have little time to enjoy their daydream, for the factory bell rings and they must hurry off to their respective workshops.

From class to stage

Chinese audiences are not really familiar with Heart for Two and its author Foissy, although the play has been staged in many countries since its debut at the Comedie-Francaise in 1971. However, Wang Bingran, director of He and She, was deeply moved by the script when he was still a student at the Beijing-based Central Academy of Drama. He directed a performance of the play in 1999 at the academy as one of his assignments in a course on one-act plays.

"I didn't really understand the play at first, but I was deeply touched by its ending," says Wang, now a director with the Beijing Children's Art Theatre. "In rehearsals with my classmates at the academy, I began to appreciate more and more the black humour of the play."

Although Wang's work was very well-received, the audience for his production of Heart for Two was limited to faculty and students of the academy. Wang has always wanted to share the play with a larger audience.

Presenting the play together with errenzhuan is the result of another experience. In 2001, Wang saw a performance of errenzhuan in Changchun, the capital of Northeast China's Jilin Province.

"I went to see the errenzhuan with the sense of superiority of an academic drama director, yet I was totally captivated by the show within the first five minutes," says Wang. "I laughed so hard that it hurt."

Wang noted that errenzhuan's power came from its close relationship with the audience, something different from the focus of productions he had been engaged in at the academy.

From then on, Wang has always followed the development of errenzhuan. However, he finds that errenzhuan is misunderstood by many people, who see it as something obscene and tasteless. Even He and She was turned down by Beijing People's Art Theatre for showing at their mini theatre.

"There is some obscenity in errenzhuan shows, but that is definitely not what interests me," says Wang, "Errenzhuan should be given the recognition it deserves, and I want to include this vital indigenous art form in my work."

And that is why today we have He and She, a show that combines two of Wang's passions.

However, He and She is not just two different works arbitrarily stuck together. There are reasons for pairing them up on the same stage.

Both Widow Ma's Inn and Heart for Two focus on the lives of a couple -- a "he" and a "she." The couples in both plays have dreams of a better life, but they do not have the power to change their situations. In Widow Ma's Inn, it is feudal morality that prevents the characters from realizing their happiness, and in Heart for Two, it is social class that decides their destiny, as "she" says in the play, "You don't get rich. You are only born rich."

"The entanglement of dreams and reality is something that happens in everyone's life, in every land," says Wang.

The two plays also have similarities in forms. Errenzhuan is generally comic in form, and in recent years it has become more and more farcical, borrowing various elements from xiangsheng (cross-talks), pop songs and acrobatics. Widow Ma's Inn combines the traditional errenzhuan plot with new forms, adapting many jokes and farcical acting.

Heart for Two also elicits bursts of laughter from the audience with its humourous dialogue. To make the one-act French play more accessible to Chinese audiences, the director localizes many of the funny parts, for example, substituting material from a Chinese ad for the original quotation from a French advertisement.

However, both Widow Ma's Inn and Heart for Two are ultimately tragicomedies, as they both have tragic endings. Ma was unable to break away from feudal morality to pursue her own happiness, and the two workers had to return to their tedious jobs.

Perhaps to emphasize the theme of the contradiction of ideals and reality, at the end of He and She, the director has the four actors recite Facing the Sea as Flowers Blossom in Warm Spring (Mianchao Dahai, Chunnuan Huakai), a poem by Hai Zi (1964-1989) who committed suicide at the age of 25.

Problems

However, the two stories themselves seem to better bespeak the theme, while the added final scene seems to overstate the obvious.

Another problem with He and She probably lies in the inaccordance of performing styles of the two genres. The contrast between errenzhuan and the French one-act play is obvious and huge, especially in terms of the relationship between the performers and the audience.

Shang Chengjun, who plays the man, and Pu Lun, who plays the woman, are both graduates of the Central Academy of Drama. In portraying their characters, they neither try to act strictly according to the original French play, nor deliberately make everything seem Chinese. The audience is presented with two characters whose nationalities are blurred. In this way, their rendering of the foreign play seems natural. Although the characters seem a little absurd, the play is generally realistic.

But, while Heart for Two presents an objective dramatic story to the audience, Widow Ma's Inn tries to integrate the audience into the show.

The two errenzhuan actors keep altering their role from participants in the story to narrators, and repeatedly insert comic distractions, acrobatics and jokes that are irrelevant to the play. One actor even comes down from the stage to talk with people in the audience.

Guan Xiaoping, who plays Di, and Yu Miaomiao, who plays Ma, both of whom perform regularly at the Heping Theatre of Changchun, show their great talent as entertainers in the play.

"Errenzhuan is very improvisational," says Guan, "we use different jokes every night."

For the performance of He and She, Guan and Yu rehearsed with the group for 37 days, which is something very rare for them.

"It is a great challenge for us," said Yu. "We keep the improvisations of errenzhuan, but at the same time try to keep within the framework of the overall performance."

However, as far as Wang is concerned, Guan and Yu do overstep the framework from time to time, inserting too many things that are irrelevant to the overall production.

"The improvisational style of errenzhuan has its strong points, but it can also distract from the flow of the overall show," said Wang, "Errenzhuan is like a wild horse, but I hope to confine its galloping within a field that our production can accommodate."

This is a problem that Wang will have to address, as he plans to put more errenzhuan works on the dramatic stage.

(China Daily July 27, 2004)