Meng Jinghui: Beijing bad boy

CHINA’S rock star director Meng Jinghui explains why he is bringing a Brechtian classic to Melbourne’s Malthouse.

Meng Jinghui chose Moira Finucane for Brecht’s dual role in The Good Person of Szechuan.

MENG Jinghui is a cult superstar. With more than two million followers on Sina Weibo, the Chinese social media cross between Twitter and Facebook, the Nationa­l Theatre of China artistic director is argu­ably better known than any other theatre director in the world.

He divides his time between his own company, PlayPlay Studio, and travelling the world as a guest director. He’s also a leading light in edgy theatre. A recent article for the US periodical The Drama Review described Meng’s style of theatre as “badass”.

Australians first saw his work in 2011 when Rhinoceros in Love, a play about love and obsess­ion directed by Meng and written by his wife, Liao Yimei, was part of the Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide arts festivals.

Now Meng is back in Australia at Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre to direct The Good Person of Szechuan by Bertold Brecht, one of Germany’s greatest 20th-century playwrights. It is the first instalment of a directors’ exchange program between the companies: in 2015, Malthouse artistic direc­tor Marion Potts will travel to Beijing to direct a work at its flagship Chinese counterpart.

The Good Person of Szechuan is a strange and culturally fanciful fable about the difficulties of being good in a world full of exploitation and greed, with a cast of gods, drug-dealers and a cross-dressing heroine.

Written while Brecht was in exile during World War II, it’s in the epic theatre tradition he reinvented, a play where the actors speak direct­ly to the audience and where the message is never obscured by over-identification with the characters in the play. Potts suggested the play — which Brecht wrote on seeing Chinese theatre for the first time in Moscow in 1935 — after meeting Meng last year.

“I thought of The Good Person of Szechuan as, even though it’s a fictional China, to see it through Meng’s eyes would throw up certain assumptions of that country. He’s a theatre maker who’s not wholly Western or Eastern; he questions our ideas, works very closely with actors­ and takes enormous risks,” she says.

Carrillo Gantner, veteran cultural fixer and Sinophile (and founder of the Malthouse Theatre’s former incarnation as the Playbox) has been responsible for introducing scores of Australian theatre makers and arts programmers to Chinese culture over the past 35 years.

He introduced them to Meng and can’t sing his praises highly enough: “He’s very down-to- earth, he’s the hot director in Beijing who brings young people to the theatre in droves.”

WHEN I meet “Badass” Meng, he’s having a smoke on the Malthouse Theatre forecourt, on a break from a series of workshops prior to rehearsals. With his scruffy black clothes and dish­evelled black hair, the 48-year-old conforms to an image of thespian creativity that knows no borders. However, as his English is rudimentary (the play will be in English with Chinese surtitles), his interpreter, Felix Ching Ching Ho, a Chinese born, Australia-based theatre maker, is constantly at his side.

Meng has a puckish charm, a way of drilling you with his eyes and a tendency to utter the odd English phrase with gusto. “Bullshit” seems to be a favourite. But with my complete lack of Mandarin, our interview is laborious and anim­ated discussions between Meng and Felix seems to shrink and dry out by the time they’re handed to me in an English version.

Yes, he says, through Felix, the play is a crit­ique of Western capitalist society and the difficulty of being good when money rules but, no, his version is not set specifically in China. “It could be everywhere or anywhere in the world.”

Brecht chose Szechuan as a location in order to create what he called verfremdungseffekt, or alienation effect. It’s a technique he thought typical of Chinese theatre (which he actually misinterpreted) but, says Meng, he’s not really interested in Brecht’s theories. He’s very keen on alienation, however, and will “reflect the unfamiliar aspects of the play” through music and visual effects.

Earlier, the play’s dramaturg and adapter, Tom Wright, says Meng is also uninterested in Marxism and is amused by Western ideas of a strongly ideological China. The play will reflect on the new China, he says, where millions have been left out of the massive economic growth of the past decades.

Meng uses a Chinese saying to describe Brecht’s ideas about China: “When you open the door you can only see what’s in front but you imagine you can see much more.” It’s an imaginative leap that could equally apply to the director himself.

He’s famous for mashing together traditional and modern, with juxtaposing Western and Chinese themes and theatre traditions; Boccaccio and Chinese opera, Theatre of the Absurd, Commedia dell’Arte and Chinese acrobatics are all freely appropriated.

He’ll get his actors to trash the set, smash things up — rebellious actions that thrill his mainly young audience.

In Beijing, Meng works with an ensemble of tried and trusted colleagues. At the Malthouse, the actors are new to each other and the director and finding a common language is not just about linguistics. It’s complicated, to say the least. “A literary adaptor sits between the script and the stage,” says Wright, formerly associate director at the Sydney Theatre Company.

“My primary duty is to the director and the living but I also play fealty to the dead. The play is still under copyright and there are a lot of strictures with regard to the Brecht estate.”

Felix has created a plain Mandarin translation of Wright’s new English version, based on the more succinct and morally sharper 1943 version Brecht wrote in Santa Monica; in the weeks between Meng’s first and second visits, this Mandarin version has been shuttling back and forth between Melbourne and Beijing with anno­tations and questions.

“Yes, translating everything does slow down conversation,” says Wright and it can be frustrating. There is also the problem of idiom; there’s no equivalent Mandarin term for irony, he says, and explaining what “camp” means, in terms of gender stereotypes, can take half an hour. “I’ve never worked like this before, but every single act of collaboration has its own rules,” he says.

Brecht’s play centres on a prostitute, Shen Te, who shows rare kindness to a trio of fact-finding gods, down on earth to check out human­kind’s capacity for generosity and finer feelings. They reward her with money to open a tobacconist’s but she is soon inundated with hangers-on expecting hand-outs. Unable to cope in her identity as a warm-hearted woman, she creates and dresses up as a male cousin, Shui Ta, who puts them all to work and demonstrates a species of economic rationalism in contrast to his cousin’s soft-heartedness.

The dual role is played by avant-garde cabaret artist Moira Finucane. Famous for her ability to transform herself in an instant and for her unsettling and highly eccentric cast of characters of both sexes, Finucane was Meng’s first choice for the role.

Brecht’s productions were more like cabaret, with patrons encouraged to smoke and mill about, she says. Her work stems from an Express­ionistic, Weimar-era aesthetic. Although she hasn’t acted in a conventional drama since the 1990s, Finucane says she’s used to working at the edge of certainty.

“Meng said things change in seven days, even in the last seven hours before opening night, so I’m confident I’ll be terrified,” she says.

These comments about the nature of theatre-making could equally apply to the changes in Meng’s lifetime. He was a student during the June 4 riots and massacres of 1989, but he says he’s never been restricted in where he works or what kind of work he makes.

It all depends how you negotiate the liberties you have, he says. “Everyone has the freedom to raise up their hands but the question for young artists is what are they going to talk about after they’ve raised their hand?” he says. “You need bravery, not in a political sense, it’s the bravery humans need to encounter the future.”

Many of Meng’s most devoted fans in China are students and young professionals born after 1989, who have grown up in a stable society of increasing freedom, prosperity and individualism. The arts, especially Western-influenced visual and performing arts, have also burgeoned. As Gantner comments: “The Chinese youth of today barely know who Mao (Zedong) was, he could be Louis XIV.” The explosion of wealth and rapid urbanis­ation would have been unthinkable during Mao’s Cultural Revolution or even in the immediate aftermath of the 1989 repression, he adds.

Gantner, a former chairman of the Melbourne Festival and Melbourne Comedy Festival and former president of the Victorian Arts Centre Trust, has been proselytising the importance of a cultural engagement with our powerful northern neighbour since he first visited a very different China in 1977.

A scion of the Myer family and a former cultural counsellor at Australia’s embassy in Beijing, he was responsible for the first Australian play seen in China — Jack Hibberd’s A Stretch of the Imagination in 1987 — and in the intervening decades has organised many major touring productions of Asian work into Australia. His Mandarin is still at “kindergarten level”, but Gantner has the advantage of being married to a Chinese producer, Ziyin Gantner, and having a trusted fixer, Zhaohui Wang, in Beijing.

A majority of Australian companies and performers now see Asia as a vital part of their touring plans and the Australian String Quartet, Bangarra Dance Theatre, Chunky Move, Musica Viva and the Sydney Symphony ­Orchestra have been among the many recent visitors to China.

A look at the program schedules of Beijing’s National Centre for the Performing Arts or Shanghai’s Grand Theatre reveals a varied high quality program of Western opera and classical music and, increasingly, Western theatre.

Over in Perth, Perth’s Black Swan Theatre will play host to Chinese director Wang Xiao­ying next year and has also opted for a Brecht vehicl­e: The Caucasian Chalk Circle, although set in Russia, is based on a Chinese folk tale.

Although Gantner says Australian audiences are definitely more open, they are still tentative about Asian work.

“Audiences are always 10-15 years behind, but if arts leaders don’t lead, how will that change?’’

He has no doubt about the vital importance of the arts as a conduit to a greater mutual understanding. “In this country we’re obsessed with our economic relationship with China, there’s a cargo-cult mentality, ‘China will save us’.

But the cultural dimension, ‘How do they live, what do they care about, what are their thoughts on the future?’, are best expressed through the arts so it’s vitally important to have a relationship that can withstand shocks and viciss­itudes, whatever they are. The arts are the best window into the soul of a country.”

It’s quite a Brechtian sentiment.

The Good Person of Szechuan opens at the Malthouse on July 2.