A night of no gale
Watched the third piece in this year's Hong Kong Arts Festival, an adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen's The Nightingale. The constant laughters of children in the auditorium may have proved well the success. The London-based director, from Yellow Earth Theatre, claims in the program note that more provocative/controversial reading of the famous tale (night-singing nightingale as signifier of the Danish author's sexuality) is abandoned for an audience of families this time (Yes, he claims the two "glamorous" dancers will be replaced by men next time).The preserved simplicity of the original plot (quite different from my usual way) might not be intriguing to me, but it conveyed an admirable attitude towards some near-forgotten "naive" themes: virtue and evil, freedom/happiness and confinement/sorrow, nature/culture, etc. The weakness is their sheer interpretation.
For me there are more oriental elements than enough which almost tagged the show as exotic: shadow play, Chinese dance, red and gold ornaments, lotus lantern, cow-face (as Death) ... Given the apparent fascination towards the Orient by the 19th-century writer, I would say the mix with fetish objects in the show (e.g. high heels, golden slippers (for lost love), foot-binding, flashy toys, blue wig...) create more dialectics for new meanings, despite their typicality. Again, my taste.
I reread Andersen's original story at home afterwards and found surprisingly an even more powerful simplicity is presented. The eight-page narration is highly economized in terms of details and ornaments. Signification asserted seem more ambivalent yet alluding, more like a song in the dark.
Note: Graphic by Arnolfini Limited from HKAF's website
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