Art from the Shadows: Execution of the Judge of Hell

My experiences with puppets have consisted mainly of whatever Jim Henson offered me as a child, whether it was green banjo-playing frogs to David Bowie’s cuddly, diabolical friends in Labyrinth. No, this month the Beijing stage will instead be welcoming performances courtesy of shadow puppets. Yep, that's right, we’ll be seeing the return of The Execution of the Judge of Hell, the brainchild of 26-year-old French director, Sarah Oppenheim, and brought to fruition with the talents of the Han Feizi Shadow Puppet Company and classically trained Beijing Opera performers. Produced last year for the first time as part of the 2009 Croisements Festival, it’s back and according to Oppenheim, full of beautiful albeit barely perceptible variations on last year’s show. Here's what Oppenheim had to say.

CL: How long have you been working on this project?

SO: For five years now we've been working on this. I met them [The Han Feizi Company] five years ago and very quickly proposed to them to put on this particular play, and then to find funds, produce it, write the text. It took time. To collaborate with the playwrights, we wrote five different versions of the play.

CL: So will there be many differences between this version and the previous?

SO: There won't be big differences. It's a continuation of the work we did last year. It will be even better, but the story will be the same. After this performance we want to do a second version of the play. Not where there's five actors and everything else is shadow puppets. The other one will only have one actor, playing You Liugui, or the lamplighter in Hell. Instead it will be three kinds of reality: one human, then shadow puppets, and then larger puppets. We can always do better!

CL: Can you give us some idea of what the play “Zha Panguan” is about?

SO: There is a girl and she wants to marry her cousin, whom she's known since she was a child. But her father doesn't approve. It's the day of the lantern festival, so during the festivities they meet and then there's a big storm and the girl's carried away. She lands in the countryside and meets a bad guy who tells her he will bring her home, but he rapes and kills her and she descends to hell. And at this moment her beloved arrives, finds her dead. The police arrive and then say that he's the murderer and he's sentenced to death. When she arrives in hell she goes to complain to the devil about her murderer and her lover's plight. The guy who killed her is the son of the judge of hell. You Liugui, the lamplighter, however, has seen everything. But now what will he do? I cannot tell you the ending, though. You’ll have to come watch it in order to find out.

CL: How did you discover this story?

SO: I proposed the story because when I was student, I was studying both Chinese and theater. So when I did my research for my masters I did it on Chinese ghost plays. The traditional “Zha Panguan,” I really liked it and wanted to put it on stage. That’s when I met Han Feizi...they liked the idea of putting Chinese opera actors and puppets on the stage at once. To search for new ways of performing. What I proposed to them was a traditional version, but in the traditional version Bao Gong is the main character. He’s a very famous judge in China- uncorruptable- and the laobaixing really like him. He has the power to judge the living and the dead. He's the hero of the play. But I wanted You Liugui, the minor character, to become the main character. Because in the original plot plot he's secondary, but without him there's no resolution. He's the link, he’s the one who tells Bao Gong what happened. And because he's like a god, a hero to Chinese people, there's this huge distance between us and him, but if a small lamplighter belonging to the laobaixing, is the hero there's less distance. He's a clown, speaking Beijinghua, like us. It reduces the distance between the audience and the characters.

CL: How was it coming from a western theater background and directing actors and puppeteers in their respective forms?

SO: The point is to work with traditions but put a new lens on it, so they use their own technique…It was my vision of the story, but they tell me if I were Chinese I wouldn’t have this way of thinking. They say it's specific to me being French but I'm the only French person they know. (Laughs) But it's funny because we used traditional techniques, and then all the people who saw it commented on it not being traditional…Everyone's afraid of the Chinese opera code. That it's already perfect and you can't break with convention. The idea here is that even if there are code's it's still understandable. At first, the reason I wanted to work with Han Feizi and the lead actor, Wang Xuehua, [plays You Liugui] because they were very open-minded an we has the same ideas about diverging from the path of traditional theater but still doing traditional theater. But when we say we want do this, they say, “no, it's not allowed.”

CL: Could you elaborate on the "Chinese opera code?" What are some examples?

SO: There's a particular way to enter the stage. For example, if I want a scene to start on the middle of the action at first it was not possible...an important character has to enter with a lot of music, stop and look at the audience and then we know he's an important character. But to say to a Beijing opera actor, “Don't look at the public, communicate with your partner on stage.” But to me it was natural to tell them that and I thought it was really small, a really small detail, but it turned out to be quite big, but it was good. We learned a lot from each other.

The Execution of the Judge of Hell; 7.30pm, Aug 5-8. RMB 280-50 (students); No. 46 Theatre, Fangjia Hutong. In Chinese with English subtitles.