------Program code: DO-080915-00344 (what's this?)
Source: CCTV.com
09-15-2008 08:49
On September the 23rd, 1978, summer was almost over and the weather was cool in Shanghai. As dusk fell, the Shanghai Workers’ Culture Palace, at No. 120, Middle Tibet Road, came to life.
 |
A small theatre at the culture palace, with a capacity of just 400 spectators, was crowded. An amateur theatre group was about to stage the play “Unsheathe Your Sword with Pride”. The story was based on the “Tian’anmen Incident” of two years before, when several innocent people, such as the honest cadre Mei Lin and her son Ouyang Ping, had been persecuted for mourning Zhou Enlai. The play would later be renamed, “Silence”
 |
Premier Zhou Enlai had passed away on January the 8th, 1976. At the Qingming Festival, or Tomb-sweeping Day, that year, millions of people spontaneously gathered in Tian’anmen Square. They brought flower baskets, wreaths and poems to mourn Zhou Enlai. However, the Gang of Four would declare their actions to be counterrevolutionary.
Wang Lishan was a member of the Youth League at the time. He wrote a poem, which contained the lines: “The enemies were glad at our sorrow. After mourning our hero, we will fight our enemies without fear.” Two years later, Zong Fuxian quoted the poem in “Silence”.
The play was a huge success. It lasted an hour and a half, and afterwards, there was a long ovation. One particular line, the last one, stuck in everyone’s minds: “People will not be silent for ever.” Before long, the whole of Shanghai was talking about the play, “Silence”.
Hu Qiaomu, the first president of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, learned about ‘Silence’ from the “Wenhui Daily”. He went straight to Shanghai to see a performance, and afterwards met the cast. He complimented Zong Fuxian on his good work. At the time, Hu Qiaomu was working on the draft of a communiqué for the Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee of the CPC.
Back in Beijing, he initiated plans to invite the cast of “Silence” to perform in the capital.
The first performance of ‘Silence’ in Beijing took place in the evening of November the 16th, 1978. Earlier that same day, the Beijing Municipal Committee of the CPC had declared the Tian’anmen Incident to have been completely legitimate.
The dramatist Cao Yu, after seeing a performance of ‘Silence’, described Zong Fuxian as “a brave pioneer and my young teacher”. In an article, he wrote: “I sense my small room getting brighter. Of a sudden, I am surrounded by great dramatists, quoting their works. Their sonorous voices sound like thunder.”
One month after the premiere of ‘Silence’ in Beijing, the Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee of the CPC convened. It resolved that henceforth, the CPC would focus on socialist construction. By this time, many theatre groups had been revived across China, and ‘Silence’ was widely performed. It even featured on the programmes of trade union activities. Eventually, the Shang Film Studio produced a movie version. which made ‘Silence’ available to a far greater audience.
The official records of the Beijing Cultural Bureau reveal that on June the 30th, 1978, Cao Yu was rehabilitated. He was re-appointed head of the Beijing People’s Art Theatre. 18 days earlier, the dramatist Guo Moruo had passed away in Beijing at the age of 86. Around the same time, the famous actor,
Jin Shan, who was 67 and had been imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution, was released and appointed head of the Central Academy of Drama. Another dramatist, Xia Yan, was assigned to the Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries, after he refused to work for the Ministry of Culture. Meanwhile, many writers and artists who had died during the Cultural Revolution were rehabilitated, and many theatre groups were revived. New plays were written, audiences returned to theatres, and drama entered a new era.
In 1980, the modern classic “Teahouse” was performed for the first time since being banned in 1958. From September to November 1980, the cast and crew of Teahouse were invited to Germany, France and Switzerland to perform. They visited 15 cities and gave 25 performances during their 50-day tour. ‘Teahouse’ became known in the West as the Miracle of the Oriental Stage. It established a key link between Chinese drama and the world.
The success of ‘Teahouse’ in the West provoked an inrush of western ideas into China. Terms such as ‘stream of consciousness’, ‘symbolism’ and ‘expressionism’ entered the campus vocabulary. On the drama stage, Maeterlinck’s symbolic drama from Belgium and the theatre of the absurd of Ionesco from France and Beckett from Ireland also appeared. These western ideas would soon have an influence on Chinese drama.
In September 1982, a drama called “Absolute Signal” was in rehearsal at the Beijing People’s Art Theatre. The director was 46-year-old Lin Zhaohua. He came from Tianjin and had graduated from the Central Academy of Drama in 1961. He had originally been assigned to the Beijing People’s Art Theater as an actor, and was appointed a director in 1978.
In 1982, the Beijing People’s Art Theater celebrated its 30th anniversary.
“Absolute Signal” was called China’s first experimental drama staged after the Cultural Revolution. It’s the story of Heizi, who is forced to take part in a train robbery. But on the train he meets his former classmate Xiaohao, his lover Mifeng and an elderly stationmaster who is devoted to his job.
A series of complex conflicts ensue, through which everyone’s thoughts and attitudes become clear. When it comes to the point in the robbery when the train is supposed to be toppled onto its side, the various characters make their choices, with the result that disaster is avoided.
Absolute Signal” was not included in the Beijing People’s Art Theatre’s official repertoire, so there was no funding for it. The sets were very basic. For ten minutes after the assessment performance, none of the censors spoke. Eventually one of them commented that, while Beijing people liked eating a kind of sweet bean, in Sichuan, they liked a bean with a special taste, and that the play could be likened to one of the beans with a special taste.
