APR.17.2013
I spent last weekend in London and saw two plays. Although
they were completely different, the first was #aiww The Arrest of Ai Weiwei at
the Hampstead Theatre and the second Untold Stories: two autobiographical
pieces by Alan Bennett at the Duchess Theatre, they were disappointing for the
same reason.
#aiww The Arrest of Ai Weiwei tells the true story of his
arrest by the Chinese government in Beijing airport as he was boarding a flight
to Taipei. The charge was that he “could
damage state security”. After the
arrest Weiwei disappeared for 81 days.
Howard Brenton wrote a play based on his conversations with
Ai Weiwei after his release. The arrest and the disappearance are, no doubt,
dramatic raw material and could have made an exciting and critical play had
Brenton explored that area rather than dealt, in a most predictable way, with
the question of what is art.
In the program notes by Edward Hall the artistic director of
Hampstead Theatre he explains his choice of that topic: ”We had been looking
for a play about China since starting in Hampstead and knew that it was a
subject that Howard Brenton was keen to explore. The rise of China is clearly
one of the most important developments of modern times but it has hardly been
discussed.”
The play that Brenton
wrote has nothing novel to say about China, rather it uses the same old binary
approach between the brave dissident artist whose work is banned, and the
boorish Communists who throw him to jail because he makes money from an art
that they cannot understand. I found the whole discussion condescending and
tedious and stayed detached from what was on the stage almost until
the end. However, after his release, in the final soliloquy when Ai Weiwei
shatters an ancient Chinese vase then I felt anger and was almost ready to put
him in prison again. There must have been another way to condemn the arbitrary
and brutal actions of the Chinese. But what I saw was an arrogant and
disrespectful act not toward the regime but rather toward the Chinese heritage
as a whole.
There is nothing
wrong with questioning the merit of Weiwei's art and it was valid to doubt the sincerity of his
installations. It was disappointing for me to realize that in the 21st
century a British play about China would still follow the old reductionist
post-Colonial approach .
The Second play
Untold Stories consists of two pieces based on Alan Bennett’s memoir A Life
Like Other People’s. In both pieces Alex Jennings plays Alan Bennett. In the
first short one Hymn, Jennings,
accompanied by a string quartet, talks about music in his childhood. The second
one Cocktail Sticks explores his relationship between his art and its
buographical sources. I found the two pieces of
Untold Stories disappointing; here too the old discussion of art
imitating life was tiresome. There were hints in the play to directions that for me could have shown promise like his
mother’s recurrent depression and her yearning for a more exciting life (a life
in which people sip cocktails) but those topics were never developed..
I go to the theatre for the drama—the action. Theatre is the medium for showing,
especially as the first play is about a
visual artist and the second about a
playwright. In a peculiar way these
two very different plays chose the approach of telling and what they
were telling has already been told a hundred time.
I think that next time I am in London I won’t take a chance
and go see the king of Showing,
Shakespeare of course.
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