In Raymond Williams’ “Monologue in Macbeth,” a table is given to show the percentage of monologue in the texts of Macbeth, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Troilus and Caressida, and Coriolanus (200). The purpose of it is to clarify that “there is radical variation between plays (and not only by date) in the use of any monologue, and also of its types, and that there are possible relations between this and predominant types of dialogue.”(199-201). However, it provides me another idea: Shakespeare is famous for the soliloquies in his plays, yet in Macbeth only 15% of the text are soliloquies, and Macbeth is one of which with most soliloquies in it; does it somehow indicate the proper percentage of soliloquies in a play? What happens when a play contains more percentage of soliloquies—will the play be ruined or it simply depends on the crafting skill? In the last two years I’ve seen some adapted Shakespearean plays, among them two performances are related to this subject I’m going to discuss. The first one is King Lear (《李爾在此》) by Contemporary Legend Theatre (or CLT, 當代傳奇劇場), and the other is Crazy Scenes (《瘋狂場景》) by Creative Society (創作社). I’ll use them as examples for “Shakespearean monological plays.”
Peter Brook says in his work The Empty Space:
[The] best dramatists explain themselves the least. They recognize that further indications will most probably be useless. They recognize that the only way to find the true path to the speaking of a word is through a process that parallels the original creative one. This can neither be by-passed nor simplified. Unfortunately, the moment a lover speaks, or a king utters, we rush to give them a label: the lover is ‘romantic’, the king is ‘noble’—and before we know it we are speaking of romantic love and kingly nobility or princeliness as though they are things we can hold in our hands and expect the actors to observe. But these are not substances and they do not exist. (13)
It is one of the main problems for staging Shakespeare, and this phenomenon still exists today, 35 years after Brook wrote the book. Even some of the most radical theatres, which tend to question and challenge the canons, show it in their avant-garde Shakespearean adaptations. However, there are also some fine adaptations, for instance, King Lear by CLT in July 2001. CLT is famous for its reformative Beijing Opera, before King Lear, it has already set its reputation by adapting Greek and Shakespearean tragedies, including Kingdom of Desire (adaptation of Macbeth, 1986), Medea (1993) and Oresteia (1995). However, King Lear by CLT is much different from its prior works. First of all, it’s a solo performance by the head of CLT, Wu Hsing-Kuo (吳興國). Secondly, the actor is greatly conscious about the characters in the play. The structure of this adaptation is based on the blur area of the actor and the roles. Thus the first act is name “The Play”, the second “Playing”, and the third “A Player”. In “The Play”, King Lear is already crazy, he doesn’t speak in the most of this act; instead, by intertwining the set pattern movements of Beijing Opera and modern dance, Lear’s madness is performed in a silent yet stunning way. Oppositely, “Playing” is extremely noisy and somewhat cheerful. The main plot of Shakespeare’s King Lear is condensed into this single act, and much is omitted. Since it’s a solo performance, Wu has to play nine characters in “Playing”, including Lear, Fool, Earl of Kent, Goneril, Regan, Cordelia, Earl of Gloucester, Edmund, and Edgar. How can the audience not get confused by his fast switching from one character to another? The role types of Beijing Opera are of significant importance here. In this act the audience sees almost all role types of Beijing Opera, like Lao Sheng (老生) for Lear, Chou (丑) for Fool, Qing Yi (青衣) for Cordelia, and so on, and thus are able to distinguish the switch of roles.[1] Does solo performance make a monological play? I think not necessarily. However, the third act, “A Player”, makes this assumption more valid. In “A Player”, Wu plays himself and talks directly about why he chooses King Lear instead of other plays as the comeback of CLT [2]. This final soliloquy by Wu as a significant role in the play hints that the former acts are played consciously, and are all “played by the same role (not only the same actor)”. Most importantly, the whole play therefore becomes a play formed by soliloquies, and the audience is not aware of this until the last act. Although Wu’s using set role types of Beijing Opera seems to be against Brook’s point of view at the first sight, “A Player” reverses the impression and found a balance. King Lear by CLT used a sly way to fix the problem Brook mentioned, but it’s good enough to be considered as a fine version of modern Shakespearean plays.
Last month (December 2002) the Creative Society performed their Crazy Scenes. It’s composed by fragmented and randomly heterogeneous images of the “crazy scenes” in King Lear, Hamlet, Othello and Macbeth. Crazy Scenes, too, starts with Lear’s madness, full of screams and shouting. After most of the eminent mad scenes in Shakespeare’s tragedies are performed, the death scenes are used to sum up the play. There doesn’t seem to be a theme other than the presentation of madness. As the play proceeds, one immediately senses that the play is mostly constructed by soliloquies. There may be some reasons for this: first, many crazy scenes of the four tragedies contain soliloquies; secondly, in these scenes the soliloquies are too famous and great for the adapter to give them up; and thirdly, it’s the best way to get rid of unnecessary characters, since there are already too many to be managed and in assumption the already existing characters are all familiar to the audience. However, are the already existing characters all familiar to the audience? Lear, Hamlet, Othello and Macbeth are famous tragic figures indeed, but it doesn’t mean that their images are unchangeable or that they cannot be subverted. Basically, the soliloquies are performed in a pastiche style and they are put together without an internal connection. Crazy Scenes has another title: The Buffet of Shakespeare’s Tragedies. It is a buffet for sure, but the courses don’t exactly fit with each other. Or, they taste rather similar: the characters are played by different actors each time they show up, but the characters are all crazy, or tragic, in the same way, so it’s hard for one to understand which character is on stage if he doesn’t memorize all the lines in the four plays or if he misses the subtitle on the screen. Except for fragmenting the text, the idea of the presentation is exactly the same as the traditional ones.
According to Deborah R. Geis:
A soliloquy usually involves the verbalization of the speaker’s interior feelings or thoughts and often entails a revelation or decision that may not be ordinarily rendered in speech outside of a theatrical framework but which is enacted aloud for the benefit of the audience. Thus, even though a soliloquy may take place in a naturalistic play, it is inherently metatheatrical because it calls for the vocalization of “thoughts” for an audience. (1995: 8-9)
What makes CLT’s King Lear better than Creative Society’s Crazy Scenes is their different concept of soliloquies: CLT makes the full use of soliloquies as a tool to combine roles with the actor, while Creative Society merely uses “the form” of soliloquies, and ignores that soliloquies are of not much meaning if they don’t “reveal”. Maybe Creative Society shouldn’t have used any of the soliloquies, after all, there’s nothing to reveal in Crazy Scenes. However, Crazy Scenes would be very not crazy without those soliloquies, and that’s the major dilemma of the production.
In these performances one can clearly see the danger of presenting a play with a lot of soliloquies. To adapt Shakespeare’s plays and to depend a lot on the Shakespearean soliloquies let the hard even harder, because they are well-known and may be a burden for a new adaptation if not handled carefully. CLT’s King Lear is clever in crafting soliloquies in solo performance, but when one examines the characters separately, it’s not difficult to find that they have less personality than the original ones. On the other hand, Crazy Scenes is successful in single characters but when viewed as a whole, the soliloquies become distracting and make one feel like attending the semester-end presentation of Seminar on the Performance of Shakespeare’s Soliloquies. CLT achieved more, and has broken its former pattern of performances. Creative Society fades a little compared with its previous works, but it’s still stylish. Nice try for both of them, they are brave to challenge the giant and their efforts provide more experiences for successors.
Notes
[1] There are mainly four categories of roles in Beijing Opera, namely Sheng (生), Dan (旦), Jing (淨), and Chou (丑). There used to be another role called Mo(末) , which has merged into Sheng. Lao Sheng and Qing Yi are the more detailed roles under the categories.
[2] CLT faced great financial difficulties, and stopped any activities for two years. When CLT finally got enough money to resume work in 2001, Wu chose King Lear for it reflects his own reality.
Works Cited
Brook, Peter. The Empty Space, New York: Touchstone, 1996.
Geis, Deborah R. Postmodern Theatric(K)S: Monologue in Contemporary American Drama (Theater: Theory/Text/Performance). Ann Arbor: University of Michgan Press, 1995.
Williams, Raymond. “Monologue in Macbeth” in Teaching the Text. Ed. Susanne Kappeler and Norman Bryson. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983.
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