Red
As Chay Yew’s Red starts, we are introduced to Sonja, a writer, who tells the audience about her trip to China to search for inspiration that she finds in the story of Hua, a Chinese Opera singer, and Ling, his Red Guard daughter. Presented as a series of interviews the action cuts and overlaps between Sonja’s present time of 1998 and the past events of the play. Sonja is ever-present, observing the action of the past. In the first few scenes, it feels as though it is Hua’s memories that we are seeing, but as the play progresses, Sonja’s presence in the scenes gradually changes from that of a passive observer to being an active participant as we learn that these events are Sonja’s own troubled memories of her patricide.
The author’s description of the setting is simple and precise: the backstage of a dilapidated Chinese Opera theatre in Shanghai. This is the theatre that Master Hua was trained in, the theatre where his daughter watched him perform, and the theatre where he died. Hua was unwilling to submit to the Red Guard, and sacrificed everything, including his life, to protect his art and his family. Hua couldn’t part with his theatre, and as he died, protecting his art and family, so did Chinese Opera, so did the Theatre.
In approaching the design of the show it is important to allow the action move at the breakneck pace with which it was written. Scenes are short, sometimes only a few sentences long, cutting between each other as the play moves through time. The only thing remaining constant is the theatre setting: a structure that has endured through the decades. In researching Chinese Opera, what spoke most clearly to me were images of smaller festival operas in which a troupe of actors would build a theatre from the ground up out of bamboo poles. These structures are as strong as they seem haphazard and about to fall down at a moments notice. In researching, I also saw numerous scaffolding and support structures made of bamboo in the same haphazard, organic way. Even the new skyscrapers of modern Shanghai are wrapped in bamboo during construction and built in the same manner as the old theatres. My approach to the set is to create one of these structures: perfectly sound but appearing to be on the verge of collapse. Within this bamboo truss-work we can be backstage of a small Shanghai opera house, long-abandoned save for a few chairs and dressing areas. Tattered, faded remains of propaganda posters hang around the space. Upstage there is a painted silk curtain from a long-forgotten communist performance with the stage beyond. The set remains static, allowing the actors and the lighting to carry us through time as we quickly move from scene to scene.
As the play opens, Sonja is isolated in a pool of light as she addresses the audience and begins to tell her story. The hard harsh light of modern Shanghai begins to expose the space as it pours in, punching through the cracks and seams of the Theatre. The bamboo trussing breaks up the light and casts shadows through the space. Sonja’s scenes in the present are dominated by this hard light, overexposing elements while shadows slice through the space. Moving into the memory scenes, the light softens and comes from within the space, driven by the practical scattered throughout: the theatre is still alive and protecting the operas from outside influence. We move back and forth between these two atmospheres as the action dissolves into memories then snaps us back to the present, but as we begin to learn that these are Sonja’s memories the worlds begin to blend and the hard light of Sonja’s time invades the space more frequently.
There is also a third lighting palette that is linked to the buried memories of Sonja/Ling’s act of patricide. The beating scene is repeated multiple times in the play, and each time more details of it are revealed. It moves from an almost anonymous act to a very graphic and personal moment as the audience learns, and Sonja remembers, the truth of what happened. The first time the scene is presented, it is highly stylized as the action starts in a pool of light. Upstage behind the curtain, the same scene is being presented more graphically in silhouette. Each successive downstage beating scene becomes more realistic, until the final beating, when the curtain has been removed and the scene is played in the violently graphic manner that we have previously only seen in silhouette. This is when Sonja finally comes to terms with her past and asks for forgiveness.
As we first dissolve into a memory scene, it should feel as if we are entering Hua’s memory, but by the end we are fully aware that these are Sonja’s memories and we should be aware if it in the cueing. The play should slowly surprise the audience with prospective change as we learn that this if fully Sonja’s story all along. There is no specific moment in which the audience should make this discovery, nor should everyone learn it at the same time, but is needs to be apparent that this is Sonja’s past well before she dons Ling’s Red Guard uniform.
