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33 Eileen Chang’s novella “Love in a Fallen City” (傾城之戀 hereafter LFC) has been regularly adapted into stage and film productions in many cities since its publication in Shanghai in 1943. Its adaptations can be considered as ongoing cultural re-creations, based on re-evaluation and re-contextualization in different places and historical periods. After the story’s first publication, Eileen Chang rewrote it as a script for stage production that was performed successfully in Shanghai in 1944, demonstrating its popularity in Shanghai during the wartime period. Forty years later, Hong Kong film director Ann Hui made it into a film in 1984, the year that the People’s Republic of China and Britain signed the agreement for the 1997 handover of Hong Kong’s sovereignty.1 In 1987, 2002, and 2005, the Hong Kong Repertory Theatre (hereafter HKRT) adapted the story for stage performances, with elements of singing and ballroom dancing included in the latest version, signaling the prosperity of Hong Kong after the handover. In 2006, the HKRT even took the Cantonese performance to Shanghai, Toronto, New York, and Beijing, thus bringing this tale of the Shanghai and Hong Kong of half a century ago not only to several major cities in China, but also to those in North America, showcasing the international status and flourishing cultures of these two cities. In 2009, a thirty-fourepisode TV drama series was aired, in which the story was transformed into a fairy tale. It was produced by the China Television Production Center and released to several channels in the Mainland, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. It was also released in the DVD format. These ongoing adaptations of Eileen Chang’s LFC speak to the story’s enduring appeal and adaptability among Chinese communities. HKRT’s stage productions , (New) Love in a Fallen City (新傾城之戀, hereafter NLFC), which have been repeatedly performed from 1987 to 2006, have to date not been 2 From Page to Stage Cultural “In-betweenness” in (New) Love in a Fallen City Jessica Tsui Yan Li 34 Eileen Chang widely discussed. This chapter focuses on the performance and reception of HKRT’s NLFC. My analysis seeks neither to consider NLFC as a copy of the “original” text created by Eileen Chang, nor to examine whether the adaptation is faithful to the earlier version. Rather, it aims to see NLFC as a cultural re-creation, in which the stage production has both maintained and transformed the representations in Eileen Chang’s LFC. I argue that a cultural “inbetweenness ” can be constructed in the stage adaptation intertwined with both familiarity and novelty, thus producing the liminal space in which the boundaries between adapted texts and adaptations, femininity and masculinity, and the colonized and the colonizer are blurred. NLFC is neither a mere replica of Chang’s text nor a completely new depiction independent of the former text. Instead, Chang’s text and HKRT’s stage adaptation are mutually implicated. In what follows, I will first discuss the theory and practice of adaptation that I will apply in my analysis. I will then adopt a feminist approach to investigate how the stage adaptation has re-evaluated the female sensibility embedded in Chang’s text and re-appropriated the story as a quest for true love. Finally, but equally importantly, I will employ postcolonial theories to contextualize this stage adaptation in terms of contemporary Hong Kong society and its relationship to Shanghai. The Theory and Practice of Adaptation As collaborative creative modes of presentation, stage and film productions inevitably involve a combination of producers, playwrights or screenwriters, directors, actors and actresses, lighting, sound effects, costumes, editing, and so on. The discrepancy between the modes of telling and showing stories requires consideration of the advantages and limitations of both mediums. Adaptations of LFC may preserve the plot and characters of the earlier text, but they are not mere duplications of the previous version. However, these adaptations cannot be considered completely new creations because they only partially transform the adapted text. As Linda Hutcheon observes, “Adaptations—as both repetition and variation—are their form of replication. Evolving by cultural selection, traveling stories adapt to local cultures, just as populations of organisms adapt to local environments.”2 The paradoxical nature of the adaptations of LFC can, however, perpetuate and transform Eileen Chang’s text while preserving the existing plot. Adaptations of LFC oscillate between the established discourses embedded in the earlier text and the counter-discourses constructed in the [3.146.255.127] Project MUSE (2024...

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