The Chinese theater

by A. E. Zucker

From what has been said it is apparent that in regard to the first principle the Chinese and the Shakespearean stage are identical. In regard to the use of the curtain and the inner stage, scholars are very much divided as to the manner and frequency with which they were employed. To quote Professor Thorndyke once more:[32]

The total evidence of the stage directions alone indicates that the arrangement prescribed was in general use in important theaters, public and private, though doubtless its adoption was gradual and subject to variation. We may suppose that the size and visibility of the inner stage varied in different theaters, and that the extent to which the curtain was used changed from decade to decade, or playwright to playwright, or manager to manager, or even according to the state of the weather and light.

The use of the curtain in Chinese theaters is very rare; and the curtain itself is by no means like the curtain to which we are accustomed. When a relatively elaborate setting is about to be placed on the stage a curtain about ten feet high by about twenty feet wide is carried by stage hands to the front of the stage, and there stretched out to cut off the view of the audience. The ends of the curtain are each sewed to a bamboo pole held upright by two coolies. In this most primitive manner a garden setting or a heavenly throne is made to appear to the audience in one burst of glory instead of being carried on piece by piece, as is the case with most properties and sceneries. The Chinese playhouse has no inner and likewise no upper stage. Curtains about beds or other pieces of furniture are used to “discover” actors in the same manner as was done on the Elizabethan stage. But all of these articles are regularly carried on the stage in full view of the audience. The size of the two stages seems to be about the same, except that the Elizabethan was much wider. The dimensions given for the stage of the Fortune are forty-three feet wide by twenty-seven and a half feet deep; while a typical Chinese stage measures about twenty-five feet in both directions.

We generally think of the Elizabethan stage as very primitive, and in this respect the Chinese stage is very much like it, only a bit more so. Both stages lack curtains, and therefore in both properties are brought on in full sight of the audience, making necessary in China the “property men” who furnished so much amusement in the performances of “The Yellow Jacket.” Shakespeare however arranged that at the end of a play, for example in “Hamlet”, the dead were carried off the stage, while in Peking convention allows that a victim of murder arise and walk off, after having gone through the motion of falling dead. The London theaters also had (at least such seems to have been definitely proved by recent writers) a small curtain at the rear of the stage shutting off a place which served as cave, shop, tomb, bed, Bathsheba’s bath, or any other locality that needed to be “discovered.” In Peking theaters things are much more conventionalized; a table represents a shop, a blue curtain with lines painted on it, held up by two stage hands, makes a city wall, a chair may be a gate or a prison door, a boat on a lake may be represented simply by the actors appearing with oars with which they seem to be rowing. Much is also symbolized; an actor on the bare stage goes through the motions of opening and shutting a door and thus shows that he has left the house. When a curtain is needed to represent a listener in another room, or a patient in a bed behind drawn curtains, two vertical bamboo poles with a horizontal one attached to them from which the curtain hangs are placed on the stage by the “property men.” The arrangement is most primitive and casual; the poles are generally tied to chairs. If the drawing of the “Swan” showing neither an inner stage nor a curtain is authentic, a similar portable curtain may have been the method employed in Elizabethan times. In Peking this is a rich, figured fabric, even though not exactly an “Arras.” If a Chinese Polonius were to conceal himself behind the arras, it would have been previously brought on by the “property men” at the beginning of the act or perhaps even just a few moments before it was needed. In a Chinese theater the center back of the stage is a wall hung with a rich piece of tapestry just as free from doors or recesses as the wall of the “Swan.” There are doors, however, at both sides of the rear wall, corresponding to those in the “Swan” drawing. As the Chinese theater has no upper stage, men on a city wall, for example, stand on a table behind the curtain held up by the stage hands. A general surveying his troops from a mountain top or a god on his throne in heaven sit on a chair placed on top of a table.

In the paucity of the stage properties we find another parallel. In Albright’s “The Shakespearean Stage”,[33] the properties are listed, and I can say from my five years’ experience that the same and no more are found on the Chinese stage; bedroom: a bed, table, chairs or stools, and lights; a hall: table, chairs, and stools; presence chamber: a throne, and occasionally tables and chairs; a church: an altar, and if needed a tomb; prison scenes: usually no properties are mentioned except fetters and chains; woods or park: large and small artificial trees, shrubbery, and benches; shop scenes: a counter and a few wares. The Chinese theater is often even a bit more simple; for example, a chair serves as a throne, or a table with a few decorations as an altar. However, for certain plays fairly elaborate paper properties are used, which are brought on and removed in full sight of the audience. In both theaters the imagination of the audience is strained a great deal more than is the case in a Belasco play; and many conventions that differ from ours, such as bringing on properties in full sight of the audience, seem just as natural as it seems to us that a stage room has only three walls.

Even though the Elizabethan and the Chinese stages have no scenery of any kind, yet it is wrong to imagine that they seem bare, for the color is supplied in the rich and elaborate robes of the actors. A Chinese stage filled with actors in court costumes of yellow, red, black, blue, or purple, with inwoven designs, fierce warriors with masks or painted faces, wearing pheasant feathers six feet long, and lovely maidens in costumes of exquisite pastel shades, walking or running about on a gaudy Oriental rug against a background of rich tapestry, form a veritable riot of color, very similar in its effect, no doubt, to what was seen on the Elizabethan stage when the actors appeared in their gowns costing from £80 to £100 in modern money. They were elaborate creations of velvet trimmed with gold and silver lace and embroidery, capped by the “forest of feathers” that Hamlet mentions as necessary for the equipment of an actor, with tapestry from Arras as background. To quote Professor Thorndyke,[34] “No stage cared more for fine clothes than the Elizabethan or lavished a larger portion of its expenses on dress.” In both theaters almost no attention is paid to historical appropriateness of costume. Elizabethan actors sometimes wore masks also, just as the Chinese often do.

THE ORCHESTRA SEATED IN A CORNER OF THE STAGE

From Jacovleff, “Le Théâtre Chinois”

The stage direction “alarums” for the entry of a king or other important personage, which may never have been associated by the reader with anything definite at all, will be full of meaning to any Westerner who has heard the Chinese orchestra sound the Leitmotiv for the entry of a famous general. The Chinese orchestra sits on the stage in full view of the audience, while in Shakespeare’s day the upper stage was the normal place for the “noise.” The use in the Elizabethan days of the word “noise” for both music and orchestra establishes another great similarity between the two theaters. In Shakespeare’s day the music seems to have been confined chiefly to the intermissions between the acts and to occasional songs, while in the Chinese drama almost every emotional part is punctuated by song. It approaches close to opera in many cases in the number of lines sung by the actors. One division of Chinese plays is that into civil and military, and in the latter the fighting is always accompanied by a terrible din of brass, drum and string music. This frantic noise stimulates in the audience the excitement which the desperate contest in arms is supposed to arouse. As a fact, these military plays are very popular with the masses, and they take up fully half the program.