Bond, a Bangzi Opera Adaptation of The Merchant of Venice (review)

On the evening of September 11, 2009, an international audience enjoyed a global performance of Bond in a London theatre. Among the audience were delegates and speakers from the fourth British Shakespeare Association conference who had discussed "local/global Shakespeares" during the daytime; the majority of them were impressed by the sensory beauty and exotic qualities of the performance.

The performance, an adaptation of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice to Henan-area bangzi in China, preserved the main plots, themes and linguistic gems of Shakespeare's play, and incorporated the traditional Chinese operatic theatrical form, which features music, typological characters, conventionalized acting and movement, and exquisite stage properties. By using a yuan zhi yuan wei de (a Chinese gastronomic term literally meaning "original gravy and original flavor") traditional Chinese theatrical form, the performance to a great extent captured the yuan zhi yuan wei de of Shakespeare's Merchant.

Two years after the performance, the feast of sensory beauty constructed by Shakespeare's wisdom and the traditional Chinese theatrical form is like a colorful yet veiled dream to me. Despite the fading memory, in the dim light, there are images of two stage properties which are vividly fixed in my mind: the abacus and the huge Chinese kitchen knife held in Shylock's hands. They vividly revealed two aspects of Shylock's character—his love of money and his hatred towards Antonio. Abacuses were traditionally used by Chinese merchants as calculators, and even twenty years ago pupils were taught to use them, but they are scarcely seen in daily life any more. So instead of being a practical tool, the abacus merely has a place in Chinese people's memory and has become an icon of calculation related to merchants. Therefore, the abacus provoked the Chinese audience's mixed feelings of foreignness and familiarity at the same time. So too the kitchen knife, one of which some Western spectators may have seen in real life or in pictures, provoked mixed feeling of foreignness and familiarity for a different part of the audience. It is the tension between foreignness and familiarity that provoked the audience's laughter, evoked their dynamic feelings of the performance in an aesthetic space, and made its imprint in their memory.

Bond shows that Shakespeare and Chinese opera are not bounded. They are both local and global. The adaptation, according to Alexander Huang, is a geographically and temporally expansive form of cross-cultural engagement. The bonding of bangzi and the Bard, can, as the adaptor expected, help each to stay vital and vibrant.