Download “March on, join bravely”: Wang Chia-ming`s journey with Richard III

“March on, join bravely”: Wang Chia-ming’s journey with Richard III
Dr Lia Wen-Ching Liang
Department of Foreign Languages and Literature, National Tsing Hua University
(Draft for IFTR Asian Theatre Working Group, 2016)
On 4 Feb 2013, it was confirmed that the skeleton found in a Leicester car park was
that of Richard III, King of England. Over the period of months, reports kept updated the
curious public how modern technology helped to understand a lost history of the last
Plantagenet King. How Richard III made his final journey into this spot remains to be
clarified, yet this discovery once again ignited debates about his personalities and legacies, as
well as a new concern about the rightful place for his reburial. This series of news prompted
Taiwanese theatre director Wang Chia-ming, a winner of the prestigious Taishi Arts Award
known for his association with Shakespeare’s Wild Sisters Group (SWSG hereafter), to stage
Richard III and his Parking Lots (Parking Lots hereafter) with a team from School of Theatre
Arts of the Taipei National University of the Arts, exploring Richard III’s journey as a King
within and beyond Shakespeare’s play. Wang’s previous Shakespearean productions (Titus:
Clipper/Puppet Theatre version in 2003 and Romeo and Juliet: Metamorphic version in
2008) had won acclaims for their deterritorialisations of Shakespeare’s plays, his Parking
Lots took a similar approach to re-examine the play, exploring multiple narrations about King
Richard III as manifested through costumes, languages, and acting styles.
Wang’s choice of directing Parking Lots presented a challenge for an audience not so
versed in the history of English monarch. Making each character known to the audience, for
example, would alone be a hefty task even with a detailed programme illustrating family trees
of Houses of York and Lancaster. To make the case even more complicated, Parking Lot
stitched together Shakespeare’s two plays, with Henry VI, part 3 opening for the first half and
Richard III concluding for the second part, involving even more historical figures unbeknown
to local audience. Also layering with narrations created by body movements, puppets, and
multi-media art, it became clear that the production was more focused on the presenting of
exercises of power rather than creating rounded and impressive characters. 1 This essays looks
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Applying narrative strategies developed from Parking Lots, Wang went on to direct Richard III. Richard III,
commissioned by Taiwan International Festival of Arts (TIFA) as the closing programme in 2015, was a drastically
different production from its predecessor. I will explore this production in a separate article.
into Wang’s major directions in narration and acting, and discuss its possible theoretical
approaches.2
Reflecting history in the making in narration
Wang’s initial decision to direct a version of Richard III was in fact a random choice.
It was decided that Wang would work with School of Drama and Theatre at the Taipei
National University of the Arts, for a history play by Shakespeare. Yet Richard III was not
initially off the list, because the leading character is considered a challenge task for seasoned
actors, and it seems every production of Richard III would be compared to other versions of
the play. When the news about the remains of Richard III came, Wang remembered his
memory of reading Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time (1951), which is a detective novel
featuring a modern investigation of Richard III’s alleged crimes. Wang was especially
intrigued by the image of lone skeletons dug out from an empty parking space. The book and
related news served as allusion to Wang’s choice for the production, and he decided to work
on Richard III without reading the play in advance. Bearing in his mind, at the same time,
was his own commitment with theatre in education, because the production was meant to be a
school production, although him was teaming up with top theatre artists as his creative team.
With this production, Wang was determined to prove that Shakespeare’s plays is not merely
meant to be treated as classical texts but one key elements of a theatrical production, which
should be considered along with other aspects concurrently, such as “acoustics,
performativity, and structure” of the production (Liang, 114).3
As Wang himself claims, there is continuity in directions for all his work (Liang 110),
and Parking Lots was in someway connecting to earlier productions, such as Zodiac (2001,
2004, 2015). It is therefore essential to see Parking Lots along with previous pieces. Wang is
famous for non-linear narrative and his juxtapositions of cultural elements as ways to present
stories, which could be observed in Trilogy of Common People (Trilogy hereafter), Wang’s
representative works with SWSG. The trilogy consists of Michael Jackson: Back to the 1980s
(2005, Michael Jackson heareafter), Bluesy Lee: Welcome to the 1970s (2011), and SMAP x
SMAP (2013), weaving social events of, respectively, the 1980s, 1970s, and 1990s into a
Must apology for my late paper: Sorry, fellow scholars in the ATWG.
Unless specified, all interview quotations are from Collaborating with Shakespeare, edited by Lia WenChing Liang (Taipei: Locus Publishing, 2016).
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theatrical story telling. Elements of popular entertainment were central to all three
productions, with Michael Jackson, Bruce Lee and Japanese boy band SMAP serving as key
motifs for each of the three production. Combining these key figures in popular culture with
events taking place in the same decades, the Trilogy evoked collective cultural memories of
Taiwanese audience in theatre. At the heart of the Trilogy were Taiwanese people's
perceptions of the world through the mass media, reflecting, for example, Taiwan's
international relationships with the USA, China, and Japan.
A sense of history was important to the Trilogy, as evidently shown in programmes of
these productions: for example, keywords in a specific decade are introduced, and tables
juxtaposing local events and international news are presented. In all three productions, it is
emphasized that history should be narrated from multiple narratives, in different styles.
Stressing on fan culture and pop concerts in Michael Jackson, Wang’s 1980s is the collages
of popular cultures. The popularity Bruce Lee has enjoyed in the 1970s, for Wang, denotes
ethnic Chinese’s fascination with the mythical image of dragon, so a myth about a big family
is told in Bluesy Lee. The 1990s is the decade of internet, and the influence of popular culture
reached a new height in a globalised world; among all, Japanese cultures impact massively
upon Taiwanese people so Wang’s SMAPxSMAP is narrated in a structure similar to Japanese
TV drama. The cast would play more than just one character in all the Trilogy. Styles aside,
narrations in the Trilogy are multiply and fragmatic, but Wang’s effort to question the
construction of history could apparently be observed.
Layers of narratives and a reflection of history could both be found in Parking Lots,
albeit in different styles. Wang was interested in utilising Shakespeare’s play to express his
own doubt on the known image of Richard III. While in Shakespeare’s Richard III,
Gloucester is known for his devious determination to be a villain, it could be argued that this
well-known posthumous image of Richard III is a political construction jointly created by the
Tudor historians in order to glorify the descendants of Henry VII, who defeated Richard III in
the field of Bosworth. Having read accounts portraying a different side of Richard III, such as
Josephine Tey’s fiction The Daughter of Time, Wang is aware of the moral lessons quite
often delivered in Shakespeare’s narration, itself a fictional invention like Tey’s story. The
discovery of the remains of Richard III therefore provided Wang with opportunities to
question the idea of history and its construction, especially through the lens of those who
enjoyed victory. Yet, this task will be relatively difficult to achieve when the intended
audience are not familiar with the complicated history of Wars of the Roses in the fifteenth
century. Richard III, after all, is not a well-known Shakespearean play in Taiwan, and it
would be relatively impossible to rely upon audience’s own familiarity with a contemporary
popular star like Michael Jackson or Bruce Lee. Staging a Shakespearian play poses a further
difficulty for Wang’s directional approach, for the shared collective memories from the
audience may be practically impossible.
Instead of making characters in Richard III more knowable and recognizable to his
audience, Wang highlighted the process of history-making in Parking Lot. He started the
Parking Lots with Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 3, making Parking Lots a double bill of
Henry VI, Part 3 and Richard III. Though Wang tailored both plays to fit into the three-hour
performance, he followed Shakespeare’s plotline closely, encircling the rise and fall of
Richard III. Following a brief appearance of Queen Margaret, Wang opened the production
with Richmond’s victory speech, which was originally delivered at the end of Shakespeare’s
Richard III. Along with fragments of actors auditioning for a big ceremony added in the
performance, Wang framed the performance as a celebration of Henry VII’s unification of
two warring Plantagenet Houses. With this setting, it became reasonable that the story of
Richard III was enacted, as entertainment, to fit the taste of the new Tudor Dynasty. It would
be difficult for any first-time viewer to distinguish one character to another, yet, the constant
battles, arranged as dance sequences, became the feature in this entertainment and
culminating into a dance of death in the second half. Characters and faces were unnamable in
these sequences, reflecting Queen Margaret’s lines:
Thy Edward he is dead, that killed my Edward
The other Edward dead, to quit my Edward:
Young York he is but boot, because both they
Matched not the high perfection of my loss. (Act IV, scene 4, 62-65)
Although characters were made anonymous, the battles and the alternation of authorities
enabled Wang’s audience to make sense of the play.
With the help of the stage design, Wang also added some local references to the
production. For Wang, the exhumation of King Richard III in the staff car park of Leicester
City Council Social Services served as a motif rather than an acute point of reference, like
what he has done in the Trilogy. Four huge concrete columns defined the onstage space, giving
the space an appearance of an underground parking floor commonly seen in big shopping malls or
residential block in Taipei, albeit different from the outdoor parking space of the site of
excavation. This grey non-place suggested a parking space, yet it served as various locations need
in Parking Lots other than a car park. The four columns also served as noticeboards of the ruling
party, displaying the name of the current monarch in big bright card. Whenever the monarch was
being changed, workers would be there to change the billboard to the rightful initial of the
monarch (E4, H6, R3, and H7) so as to keep up the identity of the English King. Comical
sequences were allocated to workmen and keepers of the game in the original Henry VI, Part 3,
and Wang added local twists to these parts, making them commenting on Taiwanese politics.
These moments, like Wang said to me in one interview, are like TV advertisings, which have no
connections with the programme itself. Although these moments are brief, they could be
memorable.4 With the help of these comical reliefs, Parking Lots attains its local relevancies
regardless of audience’s knowledge of the War of the Roses.
In short, Wang kept to Shakespeare’s narrating order, yet by adding a frame of Henry
VII’s celebration and local twists to minor characters, Wang made Parking Lots relevant to
Taiwanese society.
The right to speak
By transforming Parking Lots into one entertainment for/directed by Henry VII,
Wang also questions the idea of the right to speak. It is also through his direction for acting that
he enabled a discursive reading toward how power is structured, expressed, maintained, and even
questioned. Because of Wang’s unique direction, he was commissioned by the National Theatre
and Concert Hall to work on another version of Richard III with a group of professional actors.
With almost one third of lines delivered by the main character Richard III, it is
believed that Shakespeare wrote the play with the star actor Richard Burbage in mind.
Similar to Shakespeare, Wang has to know his actor in order to turn his concepts palpable.
Unpublished interview conducted by Lia Wen-Ching Liang on 17th June, 2015. Part of the transcript of
this interview could be read in Collaborating with Shakespeare (2016, 108123), edited by Liang.
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Because Parking Lots was a school production, Wang’s priority was to train student to work
with a Shakespearean play, he decided to work with more than twenty actors for Parking
Lots. To solve the problem of working with young and relative inexperienced student actors,
Wang came up with a training idea. He asked his male actors enacting a character without
delivering their lines, and someone else would deliver their lines using microphones. For
example, Richard III’s lines was not delivered by the actor who acted as Richard III, but by
someone who might perform Henry VII. The mismatch of body and voice, for Wang, helped
young actors to focus on either his body language or his voice one at a time. During the
workshop periods, Wang and his actors found this device particularly useful to express the
manipulation of power, and the team decided to keep this device. With this device, anyone
could play the role of Richard III, as long as they were equipped with costumes or props
connected to the characters. In another word, although it might not be possible to have one
young actor to perform Richard III, it became attainable for the team to collectively enact the
character. Such intensive treatments for major characters was already seen in Titus, in which
Wang had asked actors to speak through microphones to contrast with the delivery of their
lines without aids. But his experiments with Parking Lots push further away from the use of
natural voices.
Yet, for female actors in the team, Wang trained them differently. He found himself
unable to cast suitable female actors for Queens in the two plays, so he started to train his six
female actors in puppetry, and kept this device in the performance, too. Each character was
enacted by a team of three female actors, and one of team would serve the voice of this
character. Such a device made explicit the power game in the constructing of history. This is
not the first time that Wang combines puppetry in his works. Collaborating with Jade Shi
(Shi Pei-yu), the founder of puppetry group The Flying Group, puppets played an important
role in Wang’s Titus. Nanny Barbie, a hand puppet played by Shi, was created for Wang’s
Titus and became one of the main storytellers in the play. In addition, actors adopted puppetlike movements in their performance, creating an alienation effect for the production. 5
Incorporation puppetry in Richard III simultaneously presented vulnerability and uncanniness
of these female characters. The production began with Queen Margaret aside foretelling the
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Wang not only adopted puppetry onstage, he also collaborated with Shan Puppet and Hong Puppet,
professional Taiwanese hand puppet artists, in this year’s Taiwan International Festival of Arts for Inside
Out: A Tale of Allure and Enchantment, premiered on 21 March 2014 and restage 2325 April 2016.
fall of his son’s enemy, before Richmond delivered his victory speech. For those well-versed
audience, using a puppet to play Margaret also distilled a sense of sorcery, evoking the
alleged white magic used by Elizabeth Woodville, and adding a flavor of witchcraft recalling
witches in Macbeth. At the same time, allusion to a site of archeological dig was implicit, but
through a trapdoor, some scenes were set underneath the stage floor. The trapdoor not only
served as an entrance for characters, but also became an exit for dead soldiers died in the
battlefield. Meanwhile, this big underground dig also became a symbol of womb during the
course of performance, manifesting the power game played by women, or under-table
negotiations of marriages and deals. Wang might not have a team of strong female actors, but
he came up with various devices to express the dark undertone quite often associated with
female.
For Parking Lots, Wang’s signature non-linear style was not delivered through the
plotline (for he closely followed Shakespeare’s stories), but through unexpected narrative in
acting, costumes, maneuver of spaces on and off stage, and various audio and visual
elements. Live stream would be broadcasted if a space other than onstage space was used,
constructing a layer of narrative exclusively built on virtual image. With the help of Prof
Chin Ping Ping, the costume designer, audience would not miss the sense of enactment and
role-playing onstage. During her preparation for the costume, news about Crimean Crisis
caught her attention, and inspired her to design the style for Parking Lots. For example,
during the war dances, it was needed for the team to have quick change of costume items in
order to identify the switch of camps. Chin painted the helmets for soldiers half white and
half red, so the team would only have to swap the direction of helmets if they are changing
from one camp to another.
Reflecting upon Holledge and Tompkins’s definition of intercultural theatre as
“the meeting in the moment of performance of two or more cultural traditions, a
temporary fusing of styles and/or techniques and/or cultures” (Holledge and Tompkins
2000, 7), it seems more than apparent that Wang’s Shakespearian productions could be
discussed within the context of intercultural theatre. Wang’s Richard III was his treatment of
the Bard’s original play, not just an interpretation of the play. The style of languages was also
a big issue for Wang, for he would prefer to recreate the effects created by the iambic
pentameter of Shakespeare’s play using mandarin or Taiwanese. Although unable to have in
depth discussion in this draft, this paper presents key aspects observed in Wang’s production.
Making quite a few unusual direction, seeing the performance, no doubt, was witnessing
Wang’s sense of “march on, join bravely” while working with diverse elements. Wang
believes that theatre is “a space made up of visual and audio elements” (Liang, 115). Seeing
it this way, perceiving the musicality of sounds and words and the visuality of body
languages, gestures, coding should be consider in a higher priority than constructing the play
with a unified concept or a theme. Engaging with relevant discourse, this paper would go on
to elaborate on how visual and audio elements shaped his work politically in Parking Lots.