Privately, even Mao Zedong couldn't resist the charm of traditional Peking opera. Now the form is enjoying a renaissance, writes Fintan O'Toole
In Meilu, a relatively modest villa in the spectacularly scenic Lu Shan area of Jiangxi province, you can see evidence of one of Mao Zedong's most perverse private indulgences. The house used to be the summer residence of the nationalist leader, Chiang Kai Shek, but many communist dignitaries also had a fondness for the area and, after he took power, Mao stayed in Meilu on many occasions. In a corner of one room, in a glass case, is a stack of records and tapes that Mao had played for him while he relaxed in the villa.
Almost all of them are recordings of traditional Chinese operas. Mao loved the genre, with its weirdly beautiful high-pitched singing, its fabulously ornate costumes redolent of the ruling classes of imperial times, its colourful plots with demons, ghosts, faithful concubines, heroic generals and lovelorn scholars, its delicately choreographed gestures and showy kung fu fights.
And, of course, he banned and denounced it. Operas and singers headed his lists of "poisonous weeds", feudal hangovers that were to be rooted out of the new China. In the early 1960s, he decreed that the operas be stopped and their performers exiled to the countryside. The rich and distinctive tradition was to be a strictly private pleasure, okay for his incorruptible self but too distracting for the masses. Yet Chinese opera had such importance in the culture that this was one of the few areas in which Mao's wishes met open defiance within the communist hierarchy. When he sponsored an article in the official press denouncing an old opera called Hai Rui Dismissed from Office, about a mandarin punished by the emperor for defending the rights of the peasants, the editor of the main party paper, the People's Daily, refused to publish it and was dismissed and imprisoned.
One relic of both this reverence for traditional opera and the shock of its near extinction during the Cultural Revolution is a postage stamp that is now so rare that examples change hands for up to €2,000. It was issued in September 1962 to mark the first anniversary of the death of Mei Lanfang, the great genius of Peking opera. Mei, a man who played female roles, was the son and grandson of Peking opera performers, linked back directly to the emergence of the genre during the 19th century as a synthesis of various regional styles. He revolutionised the form in the mid-20th century, creating strong female roles, inventing a new language of dances and gestures, and systematising its stage design and make-up. The first Peking opera star to tour to Europe and the US, he fascinated and influenced western artists such as Bertolt Brecht, Charlie Chaplin and Constantin Stanislavski. That the People's Republic should issue a stamp to mark the death of a female impersonator who played concubines and goddesses says a lot about the reverence in which he was held. That the stamp should now be extremely rare because almost every copy of it was burned during the Cultural Revolution says even more about the rage that overtook a genuinely popular tradition.
Chen Shufang, a star of the China National Peking Opera Company, is one of Mei Lanfang's heirs, having been taught her skills by Du Jinfang, who was taught them by Mei. When I meet her for lunch near the company's opulent offices and theatre on the west side of Beijing, she has her own 24-year-old student, Hu Xinyuan, with her, and they are planning to spend the afternoon passing on Mei Lanfang's methods from one generation to the next.
"If I look at a performer, I can always tell who their teacher was," says Chen Shufang. "We are like teams: every team has special characteristics. It's not just the performers - even dedicated opera fans can quickly work out who your teacher was."
CONTINUITY HAS BEEN re-established. A chain, once violently broken, has been re-forged. Chen herself is one of the people who embody both the death and resurrection of traditional opera. A stately woman with the ramrod-straight bearing of a dancer and the large, richly expressive eyes that are essential to the stage presence of a Peking opera performer, her glamour barely conceals a toughness shaped both by art and life. In one sense, she is quintessentially untraditional: there used to be no such thing as a female Peking opera performer, which is why Mei Lanfang played women on stage. In another sense, it is performers such as her, children of the Cultural Revolution, who were able to recreate a tradition that was almost lost.
When Chen Shufang was 12 years old, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, she was picked out from her primary school in Beijing by Jiang Qing, Mao Zedong's wife. Madam Mao, who was put on trial as a member of the Gang of Four after her husband's death, blamed - some would say used as a scapegoat - for the crimes of the Cultural Revolution, was herself a former actor and singer. Even while helping to oversee the destruction of traditional culture, she shared her husband's secret devotion to opera. Her solution was to sponsor the new propagandist "model operas" with titles such as On the Docks, Fighting on the Plains and Taking the Tiger Mountains By Strategy. She also set out to create a new generation of performers, untainted by the feudal past. To this end, she established a small performing arts school and plucked 20 pupils from primary schools to be its students. Chen Shufang was one of them.
She had never seen Peking opera, which was banned by then, but she sang at school and picked up revolutionary anthems from the television and radio. She was delighted to be part of Madam Mao's school.
"I met her, but she was a remote figure for us, head of the school in name only," she says. "But I think she did something important. I wouldn't know what kind of a person she was, but she made a big contribution to opera. The model operas were very popular and there was at least an interest in music and performance. And though we weren't taught Peking opera in Madam Mao's school, many of the techniques we learned did come from the tradition, which was what our teachers knew. The techniques were changed from one form to another, but however quietly, something was being kept alive." (Initially at least, the model operas were of good musical quality and since they were virtually the only form of live entertainment during an entire decade , they had a real popular following. It is not unusual even now to hear older people singing songs from them in the parks of Chinese cities. Three of them were staged with reasonable success by the China National Peking Opera Company last year.)
Shortly after she finished her training at Madam Mao's school, Mao died, the Cultural Revolution ended and Chen Shufang's patron, along with the Gang of Four to which she belonged, was put on trial. The old Peking opera performers gradually returned from exile in the countryside or in labour camps, and Chen Shufang was able to learn the discipline from those who were steeped in the tradition.
"The basic training is immensely hard," she says, "because at the beginning you have to learn all of the skills."
The range of those skills is extraordinary: dance, acting, high-pitched, highly artificial singing, movement ranging from vivid swordplay and kung fu to tiny shifts in facial expression and gestures with the long sleeves of the elaborate costumes that are deeply meaningful to initiates and almost imperceptible to the untutored.
After the basic training, which lasts three years, the teacher decides which kind of role the pupil will take thereafter. For women, there are four basic roles: virtuous daughters or wives; young maidens; coquettish, vivacious girls; and fighters. Chen Shufang, because she was good at kung fu, was initially inclined towards the last of these roles, but the strength of her voice was such that she was chosen, instead, to be a virtuous wife.
Yet however deeply rooted in the tradition all of this was, it was also, in itself, a fundamental departure. Women had always been played by men: it was the Revolution, and its devotion (at least in principle) to equality that made it possible for Chen Shufang to be an opera star at all.
Some male performers continue to play female roles, at least occasionally. Among them is the current director of the China National Peking Opera Company, Jiang Qihu. Now 43, he began his training in his native Jiangsu province when he was 11. Like Chen Shufang, he found the basic training "very hard, very strict" but is now glad of it.
"You learn to control your hands, your eyes, your body. You learn to sing, to dance, to act, to do kung fu. Once you've mastered these techniques, gaining new knowledge is relatively easy," he says.
As well as being a Peking opera star, Jiang Qihu has performed in western classical plays such as The Bacchae, in which he played both the king and his mother, in modern Chinese operas such as the internationally acclaimed Night Banquet, and in hybrid productions such as a pan-Asian version of King Lear (in which he played an amalgam of the king's two wicked daughters). In all of them, he has drawn largely on the traditional Peking opera skills he first learned in his youth.
"In a traditional performance, I use traditional methods," he says. "But in a new play, I also use traditional methods, because I think the clash between an old form and new content can create something interesting. For the audience, these old forms being used in a new context can be arresting and strange."
Although he says, it took "courage" for him to venture out into modern plays and international performances, Jiang sees his openness to new ideas as anything but a betrayal of tradition. "Chinese traditional actors have had this spirit from Mei Lanfang to the present, and Mei himself was devoted to international exchange."
THIS IS CERTAINLY true. On his tour of the US in 1930, at the beginning of a dark decade for the world, Mei's public speeches were devoted to pleas for world peace based on "mutual understanding, mutual tolerance and sympathy, mutual assistance". From this perspective, the rediscovery within one of the most distinctive parts of Chinese culture of a spirit of openness is of more than artistic significance.
"This is the great advantage of the information age," says Jiang. "We can all play on the same stage."
One of the ironies of that culture, however, is that even while westerners are coming to appreciate the richly impressive skills of traditional Chinese performers, Peking opera is struggling for audiences at home.
"A lot of middle-aged people love to watch Chinese opera," says Chen Shufang, "especially as a live event rather than on TV. But opera moves very slowly, and these days society moves very quickly. Young people have very little patience now."
Jiang Qihu remains optimistic about the future, however. "There's no problem with change," he says. "It just depends on your attitude. A lot of our repertoire was created in the 20th century by Mei Lanfang, using traditional forms but creating new content for a new society. Every new difficulty has to be overcome and as you do so you create something new. It comes down to talent and training. The training gives you the skills and the talent gives you the duty to use them. Our duty in this generation is to continue the tradition of Peking opera but to think up new content for it."
If the opera stars can manage to dance with one foot in tradition and one in a global future, they will still have something important to say to China.