Trying to solve the riddle of a mystery man

By Zhao Xu (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-01-08 07:49

Director Chen Kaige's latest biopic of Peking Opera Master Mei Lanfang Forever Enthralled premiered in Hong Kong on New Year's Day - much to the delight of a troupe of China's top performers, who happened to be staging a show.

The irony, perhaps, is that these stars might not have been in Hong Kong, or onstage at all, for that matter, if it weren't for the legacy of Mei, who breathed new life into the dying art form.

Director of the Mei Lanfang Peking Opera Company Li Hongtu saw no overlap of his and the master's lives. But the 45-year-old still felt Mei's "touch", he says.

"What he did for me is what he did for all Peking Opera performers," he says.

"He lifted the art form from the gutter to a pedestal and put a halo on it."

Along the way, Mei went from being a mere performer to a legend. He was already larger than life before his death, and any attempt to sift apart the man and myth has faltered.

"How can you capture the moonlight that is Mei's performance at its most delicate and elusive?" says Li Yufu, one Mei's few surviving students.

"How can you act so gracefully and recreate such a mirage?"

Surely, the daunting nature of such a pursuit is what makes Chen's film a heroic undertaking. Since its mainland premiere, Forever Enthralled has been bathing in the brilliant limelight of its contradictions and controversies.

At the heart of the debate is whether Chen - a diehard Peking Opera fan - has been able to capture the essence of a man whose very success was built on a beautiful illusion. Mei is undisputed as Peking Opera's ultimate female impersonator.

Like many before him, the director has his own theory, which anchors on Mei's loneliness.

Li trained local Peking Opera student Yu Shaoqun, who played Mei in the film, from April to July last year. Yu's performance won unanimous acclaim despite the movie's mixed reviews.

"Yu was kept in the dark about the movie's storyline until shooting began in July," Li says.

"I remember the boy once told me he was a little bored. In fact, it was a deliberate decision by the director to instill loneliness in his heart."

Li says the master, who became her teacher in 1959 - two years before his death - had "an exceptionally open mind".

"Despite the tendency to link great creative genius with self-imposed solitude, there's no evidence Mei was a person who kept to himself," she says. "In fact, he was the opposite."

She says the power of Mei's personality broke through the barrier separating opera performers from the rest of the artistic world, from which they were excluded before him.

"His loneliness, which the director has made a point of portraying, is in a sense a requisite for all Peking Opera performers," she says.

"You have to isolate yourself to concentrate totally on your art. But, at the same time, Mei socialized widely with the artists and intellectuals of his time, and in doing so embraced the world as his forefathers had never been able to."

But behind that contradiction lies another, deeper one - the public's infatuation with the master and its zeal to see the real man. Few have been able to tease apart his personality from the characters he played onstage.

"No matter how hard people try there will always be one missing piece of the puzzle," Li says.

"But don't you think that a man of such profound influence should remain a mystery?"

(China Daily 01/08/2009 page18)