pure.royalholloway.ac.uk · Web viewAshley Thorpe. [email protected]. After thought:...
Transcript of pure.royalholloway.ac.uk · Web viewAshley Thorpe. [email protected]. After thought:...
Ashley Thorpe
After thought: archiving absence through a practice-as-
research production of Xiong Shiyi’s Lady Precious Stream
(1934)
Abstract
Lady Precious Stream is the most globally successful
Chinese play in history, written by the Chinese émigré
Xiong Shiyi (1902-1992). This English translation of a
Chinese xiqu (traditional drama) play premiered in
London’s West End in 1934, and was an instant critical
and commercial triumph. Drawing upon archival sources,
the play was directed by the author as a practice-as-
research project in 2011 to investigate how Chinese drama
aesthetics might have been used in the original
production. The full extent of Xiong’s intercultural
hybridity can only be comprehended in performance. The
article offers a reflexive comment on the archiving of
practice-as-research. It proposes that the
acknowledgement of absence in archival material opens up
a space where the subjective nature of interpretation can
be interrogated. This absence is expressed through
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different media and across different temporalities: in
the process of creating the archive of the original
performance, in the mining of that archive for resources
to inform contemporary practice, and in the subsequent
archiving of contemporary practice in articles such as
this.
AFTERTHOUGHT
An Explanatory Postscript to ‘The Professor from
Peking’ stating the author’s reason for writing
Chinese plays in the English language and giving a
brief account of the past thirty years’ happenings
in that remote country known as China.
‘Of words from mouth not surrounded by hair,
Everybody must beware!’
[…]
A writer with a smooth chin has a very slender
chance in England. Pitiable indeed was my lot when I
first came from China and wrote Lady Precious Stream
in English. Those who had read the manuscript first
would no longer believe in the play the moment they
2
met me, and those who met me first seldom cared to
read the manuscript (Hsiung 1939:163-64).
In spite of the overt racism encountered by the author,
as documented in the above autobiographical account
published in 1939, Xiong Shiyi’si (1902-1992) Lady
Precious Stream has become, without doubt, the most
globally successful Chinese play – in any dialect – in
history. This four act spoken drama adaptation and
translation of the xiqu (traditional Chinese drama) play
Hong Zong Lie Ma (The Steed with the Red Mane) became a
box office sensation in London’s West End upon its
opening in 1934. It ran for 733 successive performances
over two years. It was also produced by Morris Guest in
New York in 1935 at the Booth Theatre where it ran for
more than 200 performances. It subsequently toured across
the US with a second season in the mid-west and east, and
a third season down the east coast. This English language
text was also staged in Shanghai, Tianjin, and Hong Kong
in the mid-1930s. It was revived in London in 1939, 1943,
1944, 1947, and 1950. In 1958, Penguin Books republished
the text in a compendium of works considered suitable for
casts of young actors. Thereafter, amateur and youth
groups performed Lady Precious Stream for decades. It was
also translated by others into numerous European
languages, and was staged in the Netherlands,
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Czechoslovakia, and Hungary in the 1930s (Hsiung
1939:176), whilst Xiong himself re-translated the play
into Chinese in 1956 for publication in Hong Kong (Xiong
1956:3).
Although the play occupies an important place in the
history of the internationalization of Chinese drama, it
also signalled a turning point in representations of
Chinese drama on the British and American stages, albeit
ambivalently. The performance of Lady Precious Stream
was, in many ways, entirely consistent with the
prevailing modes of theatrical representation. Like its
predecessors, Lady Precious Stream used yellowface
techniques to make the all-White British and American
casts read as ethnically Chinese. As a consequence, the
performance can be classified as a piece of fantasy
chinoiserie that enabled British audiences to steep
themselves in Chinese exoticism. It also maintained, as
Diana Yeh suggests, "the colonial and racial order by
excising, not only from modernism, but also from
modernity, the Chinese" (Yeh 2015:195). Yet, while Yeh’s
reading is valid, I consider it to be a limited one.
Xiong’s writing, and his own personal appearance on stage
each evening as the Honourable Reader (introducing each
act with witty repartee), purposefully ruptured the
authenticity of yellowface and exposed it as a
construction. His regular appearance on stage enabled
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Xiong to claim authorial ownership of the work to each
audience. Although his presence remained tied to a
performance that was construed as exotic, that he was
present at all was a significant shift in authorial
representation in the British theatrical landscape of the
time. The effect of Xiong being in attendance was to
highlight how the representations of Chinese drama that
had come before, specifically The Yellow Jacket (1912,
British premiere 1913), and The Circle of Chalk (1929),
were the products of Anglo-American White imaginings. As
a consequence, Lady Precious Stream engaged with the
politics of representation, but in a veiled way that both
supported and shifted existing British theatrical
representations of China. In this regard, Xiong’s play
stands as a record of the negotiations that were
necessary for a Chinese playwright to stage his work in
London in the 1930s. Yet, as the corollary of this, I
also suggest that Xiong did assert Chinese modernity in
the context of British imperial and colonial supremacy
over China.
The ways in which Xiong achieved this became clear
only upon staging the play. Through the process of
directing, I came to realize how the play in performance
is more engaged with intercultural dialogue than is
indicated in the text. Indeed, upon first reading, Lady
Precious Stream is easy to dismiss as an imagining of
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xiqu in the Said Orientalist tradition; a fantasy
imagining that is devoid of the musical complexity that
structures xiqu’s many forms. My own staging of the play,
however, has revealed how Lady Precious Stream was an
interculturally hybridic performance, particularly in
terms of mise-en-scéne. My staging carefully and
thoughtfully adapted xiqu aesthetics for a non-Chinese
audience. Previously, the performance text of Lady
Precious Stream was subordinated to the literary text.
Consequently, this article seeks to explore two
distinct, but intertwined, strands to highlight the
intercultural aspects of the production. The first
engages with the archival material concerning the
performance of Lady Precious Stream during its opening
run in London in 1934. I identify absences in the
archive, and explain how this led me to stage the play as
a practice-as-research project in 2011. The second strand
reflexively analyses my own method of archiving, as I
document the decision-making process behind my 2011
staging of the play. Readers will note a lapse of several
years since my staging of the performance in 2011 and the
publication of its outcomes in written form. This derives
partly from the fact that other research projects
demanded my time, but also that reviewing the performance
after a hiatus facilitated new, posthumous, connections
between decision and outcome.
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The lapse between performance and writing, however,
raises methodological questions that ought to be
addressed. After having expended a considerable amount of
time and effort upon staging an archive as practice-as-
research, the time came when I finally felt ready to
construct my own one. I am, as Jacques Derrida suggests,
“en mal d’archive: in need of archives”, wherein mal
which usually means to suffer from a sickness, to
trouble, indicates here to search passionately “for the
archive right where it slips away” (Derrida 1995:91).
Yet, given that archives are “at once institutive and
conservative” (Derrida 1995:7), how do I document the
instability of my own decision-making processes through
the fixity of writing this archive? What goes in? What
gets edited out? What has been forgotten? Is there any
correlation between writing this article-as-archive of a
practice-as-research performance, and the act of mining
the archive for research on the original production?
In writing this piece, I have discerned a
methodological correlation between what I have undertaken
as practice, and what you are doing as reader. As you
read the trace of my own presence at a computer, and
attempt to re-construct the staging of a performance at
which you were almost certainly not present (and even if
you were, you are now in a state of absence; that is, as
remembered history), I propose that you reflexively enter
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into the very same process of subjective archival
investigation that produced my own staging of Lady
Precious Stream in 2011. As a reader, you too are en mal
d’archive.
In turn, the time lapse between staging and then
writing the archive suggests to me that reflexivity
affords visibility to archival absence. In turn, this
reflexivity has enabled me to creatively contemplate how
a text might weave together different cultural practices
to create a polysemic intercultural performance. How
might a production unpack, thread together, and become
entangled in this interweaving? How do I navigate between
my own responses to the material and the archival history
I confront? How do I do all of these things when they are
not really “there”? This article-as-archive seeks to
reflexively engage with the above by discussing the
process of researching and then staging Lady Precious
Stream.
Archival absence: tracing the performance of Lady
Precious Stream (1934)
Lady Precious Stream centres on the daughter of Prime
Minister Wang Yun, Precious Stream, who marries the
gardener Xue Pingui against the wishes of her father.
Disowned by her family and banished from the court,
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Precious Stream dwells in a cave with her pauper husband.
To make matters worse, after only one month of marriage,
Xue Pingui is summoned to fight in Mongolia. Shortly
afterwards, Precious Stream hears that Xue has been
killed in battle, when in fact he has been crowned King
of the Western Regions following military conquest. On
the day of his marriage to the Mongolian Princess of the
Western Regions, Xue flees back to China to Precious
Stream. The play concludes with reconciliation between
Xue, Precious Stream, and the Princess of the Western
Regions who has pursued Xue to China where she is palmed
off onto the Minister of Foreign Affairs.
Despite its global success across the twentieth
century, the play has been relatively neglected in
Chinese theatre criticism. Recent English language
scholarship by Shen (2006), Yeh (2014, 2015), Du (2016)
and Thorpe (2016) has re-evaluated and contextualised
Xiong’s achievements, and some work in Chinese language
scholarship is recognising the value of his work to
Chinese intercultural performance history (Xiao 2011).
Nevertheless, Xiong’s contribution to post-1911 Chinese
theatre's engagement with Western drama has yet to be
fully recognised on the Chinese mainland. This relative
neglect partly arises from context: Xiong spent the
majority of his adult life abroad, and wrote most of his
published work in English. The play is a spoken drama,
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but its engagement with xiqu makes it a hybrid of Chinese
and British theatrical conventions. Such hybrids were not
unknown in China in the early twentieth century, but they
fell between the work of the new spoken drama
playwrights, and those who considered that xiqu,
especially Jingju (“Beijing opera”), was the form of
drama best placed to represent China to itself, and to
the world. As Joshua Goldstein highlights in his
meticulous examination of this period in Chinese theatre
history, there was a vehement turn against hybrids.
Aesthetic and ideological arguments demanded that
artistic work situate itself wholly in one camp or the
other (Goldstein 2017:129-133). Even so, Xiong’s work has
not received the same attention as other playwrights who
produced similar kinds of xiqu spoken drama hybrids in
the same period, such as Ouyang Yuqian (1889-1962). This
situation remains despite Xiong’s 1956 Chinese
translation of Lady Precious Stream being re-published on
the Chinese mainland in 2006 in a bilingual edition.
Xiong asserted that his translation and adaptation
had taken “very few liberties” with the text, and that
any alterations “matter little to the essential part of
the play” (Hsiung 1939:173). Yet, it is obvious that his
adaptation significantly distorted it, not least by
changing the title from 王宝钏 “Lady Precious Bracelet” to
10
王宝川 “Lady Precious Stream”. Xiong waited until 1956, and
the publication of his own re-translation of the play
into Chinese, to explain this change. In his Foreword,
Xiong argued that whilst “Bracelet” (钏) was a poetic word
in Chinese, the English translation of “bracelet” or
“amulet” was comparatively unrefined. As a homophone,
“stream” (川) was monosyllabic like the original word
“chuan”, and offered a more poetic alternative in English
(Xiong 2006:192). Xiong also changed the structure of the
text by removing all arias and associated xiqu musical
structures to create a purely spoken drama (huaju). Thus,
in rhythm, pace, timing, and length, the play is
completely different from its source. Given that Xiong
claimed he had not used a specific text as the basis for
the play, but had instead “relied chiefly upon my memory,
as no complete version of the play was published in
China” (Hsiung 1939:179-80), such liberties are not
surprising. In addition, Xiong modified the narrative so
that Xue does not marry the Princess of the Western
Regions, but remains in a monogamous relationship with
Precious Stream. In the original, Xue marries the
Princess of the Western Regions, and the play ends with
the two women sharing Xue as first and second wife. Xiong
justified this alteration not in terms of adapting the
play for British sensibilities (which I nevertheless
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consider a significant motivation) but in asserting the
new modernity of China:
In ancient China, men were polygamous, so the King of
the Western Regions could have Lady Precious Stream as
his Queen-Proper and the Princess as his Vice-Queen.
Since the revolution in 1911, the law of our country
forbids a man to have more than one wife, and my
solution of the difficulty is the introduction of this
man of the world whose sole duty is to get an extra
lady off of my hands (Hsiung 1939:173-74).
This “man of the world” – a decidedly English idiom – is,
the play humorously informs us, a Minister who “must have
had many foreign affairs in foreign countries” (Hsiung
1939:173-74). The criticism implicit in this character,
and his rapid and very public affair with the Princess of
the Western Regions, offers a critique of the West as the
zenith of lax morality. The text implies that the more
contact the Minister of Foreign Affairs has with the rest
of the world, the looser his moral conduct becomes. As I
argue below, the desire to invert Orientalist stereotype,
and assert Chinese modernity (in the Western sense) is
layered into Xiong’s play, and this makes his achievement
all the more progressive for its time.
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However, attempting to assert Chinese modernity in
1930s London was by no means straightforward. Although
already in decline, the British Empire remained a central
dynamic through which the Other was interpreted. As Xiong
points out in the opening to his Afterthought cited at
the opening of this article, the very fact that he was
Chinese proved to be a significant barrier in the staging
of his work: British theatre producers and publishers
regularly dismissed him. As I argue elsewhere (Thorpe
2016), it was necessary for Xiong to portray himself as
an exotic character on London’s social circuit in order
to gain visibility. This visibility circumscribed the
possibilities open to him, but it also offered him a
cultural space in which to exist – a space that eluded
many Chinese in Britain as successive Chinatowns fell
into decline (Thorpe 2016:115-18). As Weihong Du has also
suggested “through emulating what is ‘recognizably
ethnic’ despite utter inauthenticity, Hsiung’s [Xiong’s]
adaptation process is a uniquely articulated cultural
brokering that works from within Orientalist
expectations” (Du 2016:361).
In such an unaccommodating context, it was a
necessity for Xiong to work collaboratively with British
theatre practitioners: he could not have staged Lady
Precious Stream alone. Indeed, Xiong’s unsuccessful
staging of later plays, mounted without the assistance of
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a prominent British collaborator, such as The Western
Chamber in 1936, and The Professor from Peking in 1939,
suggested that he needed a well-known collaborator. Lady
Precious Stream was successful not only because as a
comedy of manners it was the right kind of play for
British audiences of the period, but also because it was
supported by the fringe theatre company, the People’s
National Theatre, and co-directed by its principal
Producer, Nancy Price.ii
In fact, Price gambled all of her remaining funds on
the production. From the text, it is clear that the
collaboration between Price and Xiong produced a further
hybridised performance style. Comparisons between the
first edition of the play, published in 1934, and the
acting edition, published in 1936, demonstrate that
alterations had taken place to render some of the more
abstract performance techniques used in xiqu more
comprehensible to a British audience. For instance, the
1934 edition describes the following action for Xue
Pingui entering the stage on horseback:
A VOICE (off stage) Look out, a horse is coming!
HSIEH PING-KUI, in the uniform of a military officer,
arrives on horse-back, as is shown by his brandishing
a fancy whip with his right hand. On the girdle under
his riding-jacket there hangs a sword. He walks zigzag
14
to show he is riding to the front of the stage, and
addresses the audience holding the whip across his
breast. (Hsiung 1934:55).
The above stage direction broadly describes the
conventional movements of a xiqu actor entering the stage
with a mabian (horsewhip). However, in the 1936 acting
edition of the play, the same entrance was described as
follows:
(PROPERTY MAN R., does horses’ hoofs for HSIEH’s
entrance. …)
HSIEH (off stage R.) Look out! A horse is coming!
(Enters R., picks up whip from PROPERTY MAN’s box R.
Gallops down R. to C.)
(Hsiung 1936:36).
Here, the sound of “horses’ hoofs”, made by the clapping
of coconut shells on a marble base, accompanies the
“gallop” of the actor as he moves from stage right to
stage centre. This alteration is significant. Not only
does Lady Precious Stream engage with textual adaptation,
but it also deals with theatrical adaptation at the level
of stage form and technique. The discrepancy between
editions suggests that some xiqu movements were
considered too abstract and incomprehensible for a
15
British audience. Thus, a kind of pantomimic clarity –
and one that may well have amused the British audience
accustomed to mimesis – was deployed.
Whilst considering Xiong’s play as part of a larger
historical narrative concerning Chinese theatre on the
London stage (see Thorpe 2016), the above opened up an
interesting line of enquiry. To what extent could the
original production have engaged with the aesthetics of
xiqu? This is a particularly salient question given that
the rehearsal process was not conducted without
difficulty. Some members of the cast dropped out; the
character of General Wei remained uncast for some time
when actors repeatedly refused to take the role (Hsiung
1939:167-68). Because of this, the entire company was
assembled for a relatively short time before the
performance opened (Hsiung 1939:168). Xiong personally
attended rehearsals for four weeks to shape the
production (Yee 2002:144-45).
Academic research has tended to treat Lady Precious
Stream as a text to be read rather than a play to be
performed. What could Xiong hope to achieve with a group
of actors with limited or no knowledge of xiqu in a
relatively short space of time? A number of archives
afforded me a sense of the production through
photographic evidence, and the stage directions in the
Acting Edition were suggestive, but a detailed recording
16
of the performance – as description, photography, or film
– was, and is, absent.
In order to engage with this absence, I decided to
stage the play in full in the Department of Film, Theatre
& Television at the University of Reading in December
2011.iii Drawing upon more than 30 undergraduate students
for a period of three months, I used archival research to
guide directorial decision-making. I wanted to try to
understand the intercultural and aesthetic dilemmas that
Xiong might have faced some seventy-five years earlier.
In what follows, I document the artistic judgements I
made as they arose from a dialogue with available
archival materials. Perhaps more significantly, I
document the rationale for decisions where there was a
paucity of archived material. By placing the same
importance onto archival absence as archival presence, I
sought to enter into a subjective and creative dialogue
with Xiong’s 1934 production, rather than attempt to re-
construct it.
Staging absence: retracing the performance of Lady
Precious Stream (2011)
AFTERTHOUGHT
17
An Explanatory Postscript to ‘Lady Precious Stream’
stating the director’s reasons for wanting to stage
this Chinese play in the English language and
giving a brief account of those happenings in that
remote country known as England.
“Research is what I’m doing when I don’t know what I’m
doing” – Wernher von Braun.
In a recent interview, the British director Max Stafford-
Clark suggested that directing a play is not rocket
science (Jays 2014), and perhaps I am guilty of over-
exaggerating the complexity of this discussion by framing
it through a quotation by von Braun. Yet, I believe that
this oft-quoted maxim is an apt description for practice-
as-research. After all, if I knew exactly what I needed
to do with a play, there would be no point in staging it.
From the discrepancies between editions of the play,
discussed above, I knew that there had been some
hybridisation in the process of staging the play in 1934,
but in order to find out how that might have been
expressed, I decided to stage the play in full.
Of the two editions of Lady Precious Stream
published around the time of the first London
performance, I considered that the Acting Edition offered
a more representative record of what actually took place
18
on stage. As noted above, comparisons between the two
editions suggest that the first 1934 edition was
published as literature, rather than a practical record
of the how the play should be staged. In contrast, the
1936 edition, published shortly after the first run of
performances ended, offers a much better account of the
process of staging through the inclusion of significant
stage directions and sound cues. It also included some
photographs of the performance, a list of props, and an
indication of where music should appear. Of course, this
does not make it an accurate record of the 1934 staging,
but its publication date suggests that it was likely
informed by the first run of performances, even if it was
altered as the publication was compiled. In any case,
that Methuen considered it necessary to publish an Acting
Edition at all is testament to the play’s popularity
amongst professional and amateur performers alike in the
aftermath of the premiere.
Once I had worked out how to double up characters so
that I could assemble a more manageable cast of 14
actors, I began the process of finding a suitable
performance style. Earnest in my belief that this was a
very serious piece of early interculturalism, I began by
directing the actors to treat the script with utmost
seriousness. Of course, I understood that the play was a
comedy, but I was initially unsure as to what kind of
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humour it needed, and whether it was at heart “a serious
play”. I considered that I risked cheapening the text by
making it too lightweight. Yet, these decisions made the
text seem slow and heavy, with laboured performances. I
quickly realised that the performance style needed to be
self-conscious and light. One of my colleagues suggested
I take a look at the Carry On films from the 1970s – a
seemingly never-ending series of British films infamous
for their bawdy seaside humour. I watched a number of
these films, and so did the cast. As rehearsals
progressed, the less seriously the actors took the text,
the more the play came to life. The actors started to
have fun with the text, and the production started to
find its feet.
As I moved away from these earnest beginnings, I
discovered that Lady Precious Stream’s relationship to
its xiqu roots had been encoded into the production in a
deep and quite sophisticated way for its time. As we
started to investigate the blocking patterns, I
recognised xiqu staging. No one else involved in the
production had knowledge of xiqu, and yet those in the
rehearsal room were able to comprehend the meaning of the
movement patterns without knowing that they were, in
fact, derived from xiqu. In their simplest form, these
patterns meant that actors systematically entered from
the right of the stage and departed from the left; they
20
stepped over a threshold to indicate a change from an
exterior to an interior scene. Other, less obvious,
movement patterns included servants crossing the stage
following the zhanmen 站門 (literally “stand at the door”)
pattern by entering the stage from the right, walking to
the centre, and then separating to stand towards the
front corners of the stage. To those not versed in xiqu,
this excessive formality simply appeared to confer a
sense of comic irony upon the oft said line “Please don’t
stand on ceremony, but be seated” whilst characters
waited patiently for patterns to be executed.
Irony was, in fact, littered across the text. When
the Western Princess’ army chased Xue through successive
Mongolian checkpoints to the border of China in Act
Three, the actors followed the zhui guochang 追過場 (literally “pursue across the stage”) pattern. This
pattern requires actors to enter the stage from the right
and exit to the left in quick succession to demonstrate
pursuit across different locations (Yu 2006:778-84). By
repeating the patterns no less than three times, there
was a reflexive sense of déjà vu in the scene. Xiong
recognised this, and comically exploited it by making the
same actor play the Gatekeeper at what are supposed to be
different checkpoints – the change of guard signified
21
only by the same actor changing his appearance by donning
a beard.
As rehearsals wore on, it became clearer that the
play does not take itself very seriously. Once this was
fully recognised, I understood the complexity of Xiong’s
work. I recognised that, in actual fact, Xiong was poking
fun at some aspects of xiqu aesthetics that were
reflexively performative (such as the zhui guochang
pattern noted above). Yet, he also poked fun at British
actors who were not at all disciplined in the technique
of xiqu, and therefore needed a great deal of help with
explanatory stage directions from the author (no wonder
Xiong attended the four-weeks of rehearsal every day).
This self-conscious intercultural meta-theatricality
suggested to me that Lady Precious Stream was at once a
stereotypical Orientalist pastiche, but also a critical
comment on the limits of British acting technique, its
inability to grapple with the demands of stylised
movement. Situated in-between these two poles, Xiong
represents a Chinese artist more than able to engage with
the aesthetic concerns of both Western and Chinese drama
(as indeed did many of his “post-May Fourth”
contemporaries).iv Xiong speaks to the fact that Chinese
drama was more culturally open than British theatre of
the same period.
22
These hybridised aesthetic concerns were also clear
in the scenography. The Acting Edition confirms that the
set should ostensibly consist of a carpet, table, and
chairs: the basic setting for most xiqu performances.
Yet, the photos of the stage also suggest a stylised art
deco that spoke to the early twentieth century prediction
for minimalism. The clean lines of the chairs formed a
silhouette against the brightly lit but plain backdrop
(the only decoration being the silhouette of a tree
branch extending outwards from stage right). The photos
also show that a large textile panel was hung across the
wings, stage left. This panel is now in the collections
of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (museum no.
T.159-1964). It was woven in 1863 to mark the Ninetieth
birthday of a man surnamed Huang, and donated to the
Museum by the Stewart Lockhart family (it was the
property of James Stewart Lockhart, 1858-1937, for more
than 40 years a British colonial officer in China and
Hong Kong). Its appearance as a significant part of the
scenography for Lady Precious Stream suggested that Price
had needed to ask friends and acquaintances from her
social circle for decorative items from China. This
assortment became props, setting, or costume. Indeed, the
Theatre and Performance Collections at the same museum
also holds one of the original costumes for Precious
Stream (museum no. S.1441-1984). It is not a costume made
23
specifically for xiqu performance, but a Qing dynasty
qipao of high quality (see Fig. 1). As Price had limited
funds, such a “make do and mend” approach was probably
unavoidable, and the suggestion of opulence by a cascade
of chinoiserie may well have afforded enough of a
spectacle for the audience. Looking at production
photographs it is clear that the costumes were a mismatch
of imported clothes: they bear only a tangential
relationship to the social class of the characters they
were meant to portray.
INSERT FIG 1. SOMEWHERE AROUND HERE.
This shortcoming was pointed out to Xiong when the
famous Jingju actor Mei Lanfang (1894-1961) saw the
performance as he passed through London in the summer of
1935. Xiong was determined to try and use any influence
arising from the success of Lady Precious Stream to help
Mei obtain a theatre in London where he could perform
Jingju. Despite Xiong’s best attempts, he failed, and Mei
left London without having secured a venue. As a gesture
of thanks, Mei had arranged for costumes to be sent to
New York for the US production of Lady Precious Stream.
Furthermore, when Xiong returned to Shanghai to obtain
costumes for an unsuccessful 1936 adaptation of Xi Xiang
Ji (The Western Chamber) in London, Mei further helped
24
Xiong to secure them. When Lady Precious Stream was
revived in 1939, the costumes from both Xi Xiang Ji and
the US staging of Lady Precious Stream were re-deployed,
and Mei was credited in the theatre program for arranging
them (Thorpe 2016:126).
In staging the production in 2011, obtaining
suitable costumes proved difficult. It was not possible
to borrow the kinds of costume used in the original
production and buying the costumes was too costly. In
order to respond to the xiqu costumes that were used in
performances following the intervention of Mei Lanfang, I
decided to use xiqu costumes wherever possible, and as
systematically as possible according to role-type. I was
able to borrow some costumes from Dr. Chan Cheng and
Sherry Chan, the former having set up the Jingju Piaoyou
Hui (Jingju Ticket-friends Society) for amateur
enthusiasts in London in 1949, as well as the Lundun
Jingkun Yanxishe (London Jing-Kun Opera Association) (see
Thorpe 2016:161-80). In many ways, I considered that
since Nancy Price had borrowed costumes from her circle
of friends, I should do the same by borrowing xiqu
costumes from members of the Chinese diaspora in London.
Nevertheless, significant gaps remained, and specific
costumes were shipped from a xiqu costumer in Shanghai.
In order to decide which costumes were required, it
was necessary to classify the central characters in
25
Xiong’s play according to xiqu role-type (jiaose).v Some
role-types were self-evident: for instance, the Prime
Minster Wang Yun was a lao sheng (old man) but with a
comic air of wen chou (civilian clown); Madam Wang was a
lao dan (older female); the Western Princess was wu dan
(martial female). Others required more thought. Should
the protagonist Xue Pinggui begin as a xiao sheng
(younger male), and to what extent should his role-type
develop as the narrative develops and he becomes older?
To what degree should the softer, emotive side of the
xiao sheng role-type be expressed in the early scenes? I
decided that the play was documenting the transition of
Xue Pinggui from a xiaosheng to a sheng, a kind of
“coming of age” where the slightly soppy young gardener
becomes a stoic military hero. Thus, I directed Xue to
begin as a rather soft young man who was nevertheless
confident in his future, and for him to grow into a more
physically commanding man of the world. Whilst I
considered that the male lead Xue Pinggui followed a
developmental arc, Precious Stream was in fact secure in
her own sense of self, and thus remained simply a dan
(female role).
Attributing role-types not only helped the actors
get an idea of how they might approach their roles, but
also framed the comedy of manners that is at the heart of
Xiong’s play. In particular, the use of character-types
26
enabled social class to be more sharply satirized. These
types were exaggerated to heighten the comedy, so that,
for instance, the Princess of the Western Regions (wu
dan) was directed to be gruff and masculine, with a deep
voice and clomping movements, at odds with the refined
civility of the Chinese court. Thus, when the Princess of
the Western Regions wryly points out when she visits Xue
Pinggui in China towards the end of the play, “to one who
has been born and bred in the Western Regions and
accustomed to the freedom there, their punctilious
etiquette and strange customs are most trying” (Hsiung
1936:102). This extremely intelligent piece of writing
positions the Western woman (Mongolian) as flummoxed by
the formalities of Chinese court culture, but in a play
written by a Chinese playwright and staged in London with
British actors. If the Western Princess is taken as
European rather than Mongolian, Xiong implies that
Western Europeans, who assume themselves to be more
civilized than the East, are in fact unable to comprehend
the nature of civility of the Chinese court. It is the
Westerners who are culturally ignorant: the Orientalist
stereotype is inverted. Xiong questioned whether
Westerners of the period really understood China. Could
British actors hope to grasp the formalized techniques of
xiqu? Xiong ingeniously uses meta-theatricality to
27
highlight his own questioning of intercultural politics,
and articulates a resistance to Orientalism.
The Acting Edition of Lady Precious Stream also
includes the speeches Xiong penned to introduce each act
(they are not present in any form in the first published
edition from 1934). In restaging the production in 2011,
I felt it important to make Xiong present, just as he was
in many of the Little Theatre performances from 1934
onwards. I considered Xiong’s appearance to be important
in challenging the representative power of yellowface
that was used by the otherwise entirely white British
cast of Lady Precious Stream.vi Xiong was able to use
himself to highlight how the imitation of yellowface was
only imitation, offering a means of opening up questions
of racial impersonation (but only, of course if the
audience was inclined to explore them). The absence of
an available actor of East Asian descent to play the role
of Xiong in my production made it impossible for me to
physically put him on stage. Naturally, I did not want
recourse to impersonation; the wider politics of
impersonation were already complex because of yellowface.
If I put Xiong on the stage physically, I considered that
I risked ratifying the practice.
To retain Xiong as a product of history, I decided
to put him on stage by asking the cast to recite some of
his published recollections of staging Lady Precious
28
Stream. These were delivered before the play-proper
started and after it had concluded. This meant that Xiong
appeared in what Marvin Carlson describes as the “haunted
text”, that is, a text that produces “a simultaneous
awareness of something previously experienced and of
something being offered in the present that is both the
same and different” (Carlson 2003:51). By staging the
archive, Xiong was ghosted: he spoke with his own words
in his own period, but he was not situated in the
present. Authorial absence, which I found significant to
the methodology of using the archive to guide the
decisions of making a performance, was beginning to
emerge.
In order to frame the play using this strategy,
the actors spoke Xiong’s autobiographical writing as they
prepared for the performance of the play. This allowed my
archival intervention to frame the performance of Lady
Precious Stream, but exist as a separate layer from it.
Dramatically, this necessitated placing the backstage
onstage, a decision that became more significant as
rehearsals progressed (see Figs. 2 and 4). As stated
above, I wanted to circumvent the authorising
representative power so often afforded yellowface in
British theatre, both historically, and in the
contemporary. vii By demonstrating its inherently
constructed nature, I felt I could allude to a number of
29
important dimensions concerning the act of yellowface,
specifically the reflexive act of pretence. By
highlighting yellowface as an act of self-conscious
affectation (the point of yellowface is that the audience
recognise that the actors are not East Asian), the
stereotypical and racist attributes of the play – such as
the obsequiousness of characters in formal situations –
would also be read as constructed. East Asians were,
after all, absent from the cast of the original
production, and this needed to be marked. These offensive
acts of racial impersonation needed to be historically
contextualised as a product of staging the play in London
in 1934 when there were relatively few Chinese actors
taking to the stage.viii Whilst there is much to Xiong’s
writing that is progressive, the performance nevertheless
participated in the racist politics of the period, where
explicit racial impersonation was commonplace.
I also anticipated that acknowledging absence would
further highlight the multiple acts of reconstruction and
interpretation at the heart of staging a production from
of archival material. Thus, actors were shown “yellowing
up” in front of the audience (something not undertaken in
the original), and they were seen passing across the back
of the stage in order to enter from the correct side of
the stage. Thus, there was a constant interplay between
30
actors “acting” as characters, performing as “actors,”
and “not acting” (Kirby 1972).
Temporally locating the play was also necessary
because the language Xiong deployed was littered with
early twentieth-century British idioms, such as:
Silver Stream: For shame, to chaff my dear one like
this! (Hsiung 1934:18)
Golden Stream: He is certainly playing the game!
(Hsiung 1934:43)
Precious Stream: Dear mother, you are indeed a
darling! (Hsiung 1934:158)
In fact, one of the remarkable things about the text is
how these idioms demonstrate Xiong’s command of English –
a command that was certainly at odds with British
expectations of a Chinese person at the time. Yet what
was a tour de force in the 1930s became a limitation for
a production in the twenty-first century. These idioms
root the play to its historical moment of production. To
cut them would be to diminish Xiong’s linguistic
achievement in adapting the play for a British audience
of the 1930s; to retain them was to sabotage the
contemporary relevancy of the work. I considered that the
only solution was to speak to both temporalities, to set
31
the play in 1934 but as a product of twenty-first century
research.
With the backstage already on stage, I extended this
to also perform processes of research. There was an on-
going dialogue between the archive and its live
enactment. I decided that any visual archival material
that I had used to shape the mise-en-scène of specific
moments in my production should be projected on to the
plain backdrop at the rear of the stage at the same time
as it was enacted. Not only did I anticipate that this
would create disjuncture between the historical sources
and their contemporary re-imagining (the haunted
performance text), but it would also actively highlight
my own interventions as a response to the material.
Indeed, whilst there were some photos from the 1934/5
stage production, some photos taken for publicity
purposes, published in Play Pictorial (vol.66, no.394,
February 1935, 3-6), were likely staged for a
photographer. The extent to which such images are
representative of the production itself is thus open to
question. Nevertheless, by drawing on these images, I
wanted to show how the original production was explicitly
both “there” and “not there” in my own work: a moment
past, but a moment influencing the present. This was
expressed in my first conceptual drawing for the
32
production (see Fig. 2) and realised in performance (Fig.
5).
INSERT FIGS 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 AROUND HERE.
The final thread to emerge from this line of enquiry
was that if Xiong was now present in the production
through autobiography, I also needed to be both
autobiographically present and absent to signal how the
performance was a contemporary product of an imaginative
dialogue with archival sources. In order to do this, I
decided to add yet another backstage area, this time
based in the present, so that my own journey through the
archives was aired. Thus, the conceptual framework for
the production began in 2011, with the crew running the
entire show visible to the audience, and with a 1934
back-stage area being built to the digitally recorded
sound of my voice reading out the email correspondence I
had undertaken with different archives (Fig. 3).
Background music made by The Matthew Herbert Big Band –
music that draws upon the 1930s Big Band aesthetic but
also uses digital technology to cut and sample sounds –
spoke to the concept of assembling disparate sources, and
of speaking to different temporalities simultaneously.
The actors entered the space dressed as themselves and
proceeded to change into 1930s “everyday” dress.
33
Once the backstage area was set, the houselights of
the theatre changed to the backstage lights of the 1930s,
Matthew Herbert’s music was replaced by a record from
1934 played from a gramophone situated at the rear of the
stage, and the actors changed from their 1930s everyday
clothes into their costumes for the play (Fig. 4). It was
during this time that Xiong’s autobiographical lines were
delivered. Mirroring the opening, the play ended with a
curtain call at the end of the play in 1934, and then
returned to the backstage area of the same year, where
actors got undressed and spoke more lines from Xiong’s
recollections. A final curtain call at the front of the
stage, with the houselights brought up in the auditorium
itself, signalled a return to 2011. The aim behind this
conceptual play-within-a-play-within-a-play was to allude
to both the time in which the play was written and the
contemporary moment in which it was produced, and to
further highlight the subjective nature of historical
reconstruction.
With the conceptual framework in place, the last
problem was to find suitable music. The licence holders
of the play, Samuel French, used to sell a recording of
the music and sound effects, which was available to
purchase along with the licence to perform. When I
contacted them to enquire as to its availability, they
informed me that the recording had long since sold out.
34
What is more, they had not kept a copy of the recording
in their archives. The aural record of the play was now
lost. Despite searching in numerous archives, and asking
for assistance from various networks, I was unable to
obtain a copy. The Acting Edition stipulated at which
points music was to be used, but did not stipulate what
that music should be. The only existing record I found
was a piano score published in 1936 for the US production
of a song called Lady Precious Stream, written by Edgar
Fairchild with lyrics by Milton Pascal. My production
needed live music but the Little Theatre, as its name
suggests, is small with only 377 seats, the orchestra had
to not take up much room. Therefore, I decided to arrange
all the music for the piano. The Fairchild composition,
although not historically accurate for the London
performance, became the overture, and was also played at
the opening, and closing of each of the four acts (with
one intermission between acts two and three).
Recognising that one piece of music could not
sustain a performance of almost three hours, I decided to
look back to the xiqu original for inspiration. Because
Jingju music is made of both basic fixed tunes (qupai)
and beat-tune form (banqiangti), I opted to incorporate
both types.ix Fairchild’s work stood for the qupai (the
precedent for this was that Cantonese Yueju regularly
absorbed fixed tunes from outside xiqu into its
35
repertoire), whilst I adapted music from the Jingju score
in the beat-tune form. One salient example was the
following fragment in erhuang (the “erhuang mode”) manban
(slow metre in 4/4 time):
[INSERT FIGURE 8 HERE]
This fragment was rendered into Western musical notation,
with a simple left hand accompaniment for the piano:
[INSERT FIGURE 9 HERE]
This tune, used in the xiqu version of the play for the
female (dan) lead’s first entrance was also used for
Precious Stream’s entrances in my staging. There is no
way of knowing to what extent Xiong followed a similar
musical trajectory in 1934. Nevertheless, I considered
that the incorporation of dramatically appropriate music
from Jingju and Western chinoiserie-inspired tunes
encapsulated the intercultural/Orientalist aesthetic at
the heart of Xiong’s play.
Re-archiving absence
As I noted in the introduction, it has taken me several
years to write this reflection upon the decision-making
36
process behind the project. I felt I needed time to
reflect upon the decisions I made to have some kind of
historical distance before archiving the performance in
writing. My Afterthought could only come after thought:
it was only from the state of absence that I felt able to
subject my own records of the process to analysis. This
time-lapse does not make this article-as-archive more
“accurate”, or “objective.” Rather, I am inclined to
suggest that this lapse makes the archive more
subjective, partial, absent, and as a consequence,
genuine.
It is strangely coincidental that Xiong also left a
five-year gap between the opening run of Lady Precious
Stream in 1934, and writing his fullest recollections of
it which were published in 1939, and which have framed
this article. Looking back, I can see that staging the
production enabled me to better comprehend Xiong’s
achievements in the context of numerous constraints. He
clearly recognised the limitations of his situation. He
had not formally studied xiqu, so perhaps he never
contemplated teaching xiqu movement techniques to a group
of British actors. Yet, he obviously understood the
dramaturgy of xiqu staging, and sought to carefully
encode the relevant movement patterns into the text. The
result was a truly intercultural mise en scène that
enabled actors to move around the stage according to
37
formalised xiqu conventions. Upon watching a documentary
made by members of the Xiong family that interspersed
scenes from my own production with those from a CCTV
televised Jingju production of Hong Zong Lie Ma, even I
was surprised at how similar they were. There are moments
when the mise en scène is identical.x For this to have
first been achieved on the West End stage in 1934 in a
matter of weeks is a remarkable feat. Historically, this
production was an important development in moving away
from the clichéd and pastiche-laden performances that had
come before it.
Theatre historiographer Gilli Bush-Bailey suggests
that “new scholars and new forms of scholarship are
beginning to emerge, as practitioners engaging with the
histories of their craft in self-reflexive and critical
research seek to situate their own practice within a
historical context” (Bush-Bailey 2012:287-88). I suggest
that this reflexive mode exists in all aspects of
practice-as-research, including archiving once the
practical project is complete, and as such, becomes an
archive where the physical presence of the author exists
only as a trace in writing. Yet, there is reflexivity in
Xiong’s own archive where he retains a remarkable
presence that is at once humble, but nevertheless
suggestive of a strong desire to be in the limelight
(literally, by taking to the stage during performances of
38
his own plays) and to be publicly recognised for his
talents. I leave the final say for both of us to him --
the concluding lines of the same 1939 afterthought that
opened this article:
In conclusion, I wish to record my hearty thanks to
all my friends who have directly or indirectly
encouraged me to write plays in the English language,
and particularly to producers, actors, and actresses
on both sides of the Atlantic for their gracious
indulgence in sticking to my original lines when, in
their heart of hearts, they were itching to replace
them with much better phrasing (Hsiung 1939:198).
Author Bio
Ashley Thorpe is Senior Lecturer in Theatre in the
Department of Drama, Theatre & Dance at Royal Holloway,
University of London. He has published two monographs:
The Role of the Chou (“Clown”) in Traditional Chinese
Drama (Edwin Mellen Press, 2007), and Performing China on
the London Stage: Chinese opera and global power, 1759-
2008 (Palgrave, 2016). He has also published articles in
Asian Theatre Journal, Contemporary Theatre Review,
Studies in Theatre & Performance, and TRI.
39
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Du Weihong. 2016. “S. I. Hsiung: New Discourse and Drama
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Fairchild, Edgar. 1936. Lady Precious Stream – From the
Morris Guest Production “Lady Precious Stream” by S. I.
Hsiung. New York: Edward B. Marks.
Goldstein, Joshua. 2007. Drama Kings: Players and Publics
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Hsiung, S.I. 1936. Lady Precious Stream: Acting Edition.
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Hsiung, S.I. 1939. The Professor from Peking. London:
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42
i Xiong Shiyi is Romanised using the contemporary Pinyin system. Up
until the 1960s, the Wade Giles system was more common, which
Romanised his name as Hsiung Shih-yi. I have opted for the current
Romanisation in this article, but have left sources in the Wade-
Giles system where they appear under that name.
ii The brainchild of the theatrical entrepreneur and critic J.T.
Grein, who firmly believed in independent theatre, the PNT was a
subscription organisation. Members paid two shillings and sixpence
a year to join, which entitled them to see all productions for the
price of one shilling and sixpence. Non-members would be asked to
pay two shillings and sixpence, plus tax. It was anticipated that
this financial model would facilitate a sustainable venture that
would guarantee actor’s wages of five pounds a week for one month,
being extended if the play was a success. Grein approached the
actress Nancy Price about the venture, and she agreed to work with
him to establish the PNT (Wearing, 1996:71). Price makes no
mention of Lady Precious Stream in her memoir Into An Hour-Glass
published in 1953, though there is evidence that the PNT was
broadly interested in Asian theatre. The PNT Magazine from October
1933 included a two-page article, “The Theatre in Japan,” written
by the noted Japanese poet and translator Gonnosuke Komai who was
living in London at the time. In his memoirs, Hsiung recalls that
Price became very excited about the play following its
recommendation by the noted English actor Jonathan Field (1912-
1990).
iii The performance was staged in the Bulmershe Theatre, Minghella
Studios, Department of Film, Theatre & Television, University of
Reading, 8-10 December 2011, and then the Islington Chinese
Association, London, 16-17 December 2011.
iv The May Fourth Movement, or New Culture Movement, was named after
a student demonstration held on May 4th 1919. The demonstration was
in response to the Treaty of Versailles, which dictated that
German interests in Shandong should be ceded to Japan rather than
to China. Although named after it, the movement was operative as
early as 1915, and sought to challenge the centrality of Confucian
doctrine to all forms of Chinese culture, including literature and
drama, in the search for a new kind of post-imperial nationalism.
With the rejection of Confucianism, there came instead a critical
examination of Western ideologies, including capitalism (and its
role in colonialism), communism, individualism, and social
equality (including the equal treatment of women). Advocators for
a new kind of Chinese culture also critically engaged with Western
forms through the translation of texts (Xiong played a part in
this by translating British playwrights such as Shaw, Barrie and
Galsworthy into Chinese), and wrote literature in the vernacular
so that the general populace could better comprehend it. See
Mitter 2004.
v There are four role-types in xiqu: sheng (male), dan (female),
jing (painted face) and chou (clown). The visual appearance of the
actor – through make-up, costume and movement – immediately
indicates the social status, age, ideology and even morality of
the character, to the audience.
vi In this context, yellowface involved actors making up their faces
with white pigment to make their faces appear paler, and the use
of black paint to accentuate the eyebrows, and change the shape of
the eyes.
vii For instance, in January 2017, British East Asian actors staged
a protest outside the Coronet Theatre in Notting Hill, West London
following the decision to cast Howard Barker’s In the Depths of
Dead, set in ‘ancient China’, with an all white cast.
viii The only East Asian actors to have played significant Chinese
roles in London’s West End prior to 1934 were Anna May Wong and
Rose Quong. See Thorpe, 2016: 96-101.
ix For a general overview of xiqu music, see Thorpe in
Liu, 2016:134-8. For a more thorough investigation, see Wichmann,
1991.
x This documentary can be viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=o932pUECB_Q&feature=em-upload_owner