Huang Lu (left) and Zhang Ruoyun (front center) star in Lin Zhaohua's The Three Sisters Waiting for Godot, which merges the masterpieces of Anton Chekhov and Samuel Beckett.[Photo provided to China Daily]
Lin Zhaohua recently revived his controversial play The Three Sisters Waiting for Godot.
In 1998, the director had merged Russian author Anton Chekhov's story, The Three Sisters, with Samuel Beckett's novel, Waiting for Godot, to create the experimental play, which, at the time, turned out to be a stage flop.
Lin staged it again from Sept 20 to 24 in Beijing, following 60 performances of the play in 44 Chinese cities since late last year.
Two decades ago, Lin started to write the play while he was recovering from an illness.
The Three Sisters tells the story of a late military officer's three daughters, who, after years of rural life, long to return to their hometown of Moscow.
The play cost Lin and his friend, stage designer Yi Liming, an amount of money that was enough to buy a car each－a luxury back then.
But despite the past monetary loss, Lin, 82, has brought back the play for a younger generation of Chinese theatergoers. Also, compared to 20 years ago, the play itself hasn't changed much and will test the modern audience's patience with its long rambling dialogue and unchanging stage settings.
In the play, the three sisters－Olga, Masha and Irina－sit at the center of the stage in a room made of metal frames, white curtains and no real walls. Each woman talks about her own life experience with barely any emotion and seldom making eye contact with each other.
In the play there are also Beckett's two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, waiting for Godot, while chatting aimlessly to kill time. Sometimes, the duo step back and become Vershinin and Tuzenbach, the soldiers that separately fall in love with Masha and Irina in Chekhov's original work.
The characters Vladimir and Estragon in the play.[Photo provided to China Daily]
A "river" flows around the room, the reflection of which can be seen in the mirrors on the ceiling of venues where the play is performed.
Although there are times when Vershinin and Tuzenbach "walk in the river", they are never able to get inside the room and the three sisters, meanwhile, never try to step out of it.
In the play, Lin has minimized direct communication between the characters and asked the actresses and actors to speak in the same manner they would in daily life.
Ye Shulin, a doctoral candidate at the Shanghai Theatre Academy, says Chekhov wanted to demonstrate that people cannot communicate with each other, while there is "a collapse of language" in Waiting for Godot.
The iconic lines from the two original stories, "let's go to Moscow" and "we're waiting for Godot" are spoken many times throughout this play.
It is believed that the audience "could not understand" the play twenty years ago, according to Xi Muliang, who directed a version of The Three Sisters Waiting for Godot at Peking University in 2011.
In 1998, Lin's play was originally scheduled for 24 performances but ended up only staging 19, but it was welcomed by some Chinese intellectuals at the time.
Author and critic Li Tuo thought the play was Lin's career best. Peng Tao, now a professor of drama literature at the Central Academy of Drama in Beijing, wrote in 2008 that the play showed Lin's inner exploration as an artist, calling the play a production in the "Don Quixote spirit".
TV and film actor Zhang Ruoyun and actress Huang Lu have been cast as Vladimir (Vershinin) and Masha in the new revival in Beijing.
"I'm grateful that contemporary audiences sat, watched the play and listened to the lines," Lin says of the play, which has a running time of two and a half hours.
