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Performing Comic Failure in Waiting for Godot with Jingju Actors

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 August 2017

WEI FENG
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Abstract

Since the 1980s the Taiwanese theatre troupe Contemporary Legend Theatre (CLT) has been devoted to transforming jingju by way of adapting world classics. Through an analysis of its adaptation of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot (2005), this article considers how CLT pushes the boundaries of jingju acting, which is made up of singing, speaking, dance-acting and combat. To meet Beckett's challenge of performing comic failure, CLT integrates jingju restraint and Western slapstick. In so doing, CLT liberates the actors’ bodies from jingju conventions to produce a new aesthetic, which also gives the original play a new metaphysical interpretation.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 42 , Issue 2 , July 2017 , pp. 119 - 131
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 2017 

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References

NOTES

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5 See Li, ‘Women Yao Wei Dengdai Er Dengdai Ma?’, p. 12.

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8 Youhan, Chen, Xiqu Biaoyan Gailun (Beijing: Wenhua Yishu Chubanshe, 1996), p. 246.Google Scholar

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22 See Beckett, Waiting for Godot, pp. 58–9.

23 This translation is based on the original English subtitle in the DVD of this production. I made some changes to represent the syntactical structures of the original Chinese.

24 Wu Hsing-kuo, ‘Interview with Wu Hsing-kuo’ by Wei Feng (15 May 2014). Wu told me that this passage was added and written by Chin Shih-chieh to make it sound ridiculously funny. They planned to demonstrate how the two tramps made a big fuss of waiting.

25 For details of jingju’s lyric structure see Wichmann, Elizabeth, Listening to Theatre: The Aural Dimension of Beijing Opera (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1991), pp. 33–8.Google Scholar

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32 Dale, Alan, Comedy Is a Man in Trouble: Slapstick in American Movies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 3.Google Scholar

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34 Bevis, Matthew, Comedy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 29.Google Scholar

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36 Ibid., p. 139.

37 Bergson, Henri, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Brereton, Cloudesely (Rockville: Arc Manor, 2008), p. 43.Google Scholar

38 Wichmann, Listening to Theatre, p. 4.

39 Marmysz, John, Laughing at Nothing: Humor as a Response to Nihilism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), p. 125 Google Scholar.

40 See Faraone, Mario, ‘“Pity We Haven't a Piece of Rope”: Beckett, Zen and the Lack of a Piece of Rope’, in Guardamagna, Daniela and Sebellin, Rossana M., eds., The Tragic Comedy of Samuel Beckett: Beckett in Rome, 17–19 April 2008 (Rome: Università degli Studi di Roma, 2009), pp. 156–76Google Scholar.

41 See ‘Xingsu Xin Zhongguo Xiqu’, Ershiyi Shiji, 112 (2009), pp. 90–6, here p. 94.

42 Conrad Hyers, M., Zen and the Comic Spirit (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1974), p. 39 Google Scholar.

43 Ibid., p. 90.

44 Wu, ‘Canque Yu Cibei De Xiaorong’, p. 56.