words yvonne teh

With only 11 actors, the Chung Ying Theatre
Company had to find an unusual way to stage
a play with 70 characters…

Who’s got the more famous snout: Pinocchio or Cyrano? While some might plumb for the wooden puppet whose greatest wish was to become a real boy, others would go for the real-life 17th century personality immortalised in a 19th century play by French poet and dramatist Edmond Rostand. For even though many Hong Kongers may not immediately recognize the name Hercule Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac, says Peter Jordan, director of the Chung Ying Theatre Company’s production of Cyrano de Bergerac, “I’d imagine that most people would have heard of
the story of the man with a big nose and be generally familiar with the idea that he feels he’s too ugly to declare his love.” Especially for a woman as beautiful as the young Roxanne.

Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac premiered in France in 1897. In the 110 years since then, the French play has been translated into many languages, performed in a multitude of territories around the world and made into a number of movies, including a 1900 silent film starring Constant Coquelin (who had previously played the part of Cyrano on stage), a 1990 French film with superstar Gérard Depardieu in the title role, and several English productions, including a 1974 made-for-TV cartoon version.
Additionally, local theatre doyen Chung King-Fai directed a Cantonese version of this romantic work at the Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts (HKAPA) 20 years ago that met with such great success it is surprising that the Chung Ying Theatre Company’s production this December will be the first in Hong Kong since then. After all, as Jordan – who is the current head of acting at HKAPA – says, “It’s very much a story that appeals to all levels of society and all ages.” Furthermore, “I think Hong Kong audiences will like it because there’s a lot of action, comedy, romance and drama,” he says of a play he feels has an uplifting ending and which its creator looked upon as heroic comedy but some versions have made out to be a tragedy.

Nonetheless, he can understand why there has been a dearth of productions of this popular play over here, and it’s not because he believes romantic love is a Western conceit and this overly romantic play won’t appeal to contemporary Hong Kong society. “The themes within the play,” he says, “are quite universally human.” And although he doesn’t say it in so many words, he implies that it is not for nothing, after all, that this work that’s full of “quite basic emotions” is considered a classic and loved in various parts of the world.

In fact, the Hong Kong-born theatre man – who identifies himself as a Hong Konger even if “I don’t know if other people consider me that” – tends to the view that Hong Kongers are extremely romantic and would therefore make an ideal audience for the play. He cites actors in the final scene being “literally in floods of tears for 10 minutes right through to the end”.

Admittedly, Jordan’s first impressions upon returning here
in 1998 after many years abroad was not of such sentimentality. “When I first came back to Hong Kong, one thing I found very difficult to deal with was the very neutral face people walk around on the street with,” he shares. “They seemed to look completely impassive in public.

“But when I came to teach, or had personal relationships, they emote in exactly the same way as everybody else.” Or maybe even more, since his all ethnic-Chinese cast headed by Edmund Lo, William Lo and Gigi Yau have already produced highly emotional performances with a sustained weeping the theatre veteran had never seen before, and has led him to conclude that, “The Chinese are deeply emotional and romantic people.”

Rather than culture, then, the greatest impediment to staging Cyrano de Bergerac in Hong Kong has been scale. As Jordan explains, “If you were to stage it exactly as Edmond Rostand apparently required, you would need a cast of 70 people and a huge budget.” Although he is basing his production on Chung King-Fai’s 20-year-old script, he only has a cast of 11 to call upon, and so he and the Chung Ying Theatre Company have come up with a novel approach he intriguingly terms ‘poor theatre’.

Asked to elaborate, Jordan shares that, “Originally, that term came from a Polish director called [Jerzy] Grotowski but I’m not claiming to be imitating Grotowski. What I am going for is a kind of minimalistic style in the sense that the actors do everything, and everything they do is in front of the audience. They don’t hide. You can even see them when they’re off stage, waiting to come on stage. They play their own musical instruments, they produce their own sound effects. You see them changing costumes, they move the set and so on.”

He points out that this style of theatre is common, especially for touring productions, in Europe where he worked for many years as a professional actor. Yet he realises he’s taking a risk with the technique here, as it has not been used much by professional troupes in this part of the world. “But,” he figures, “if you have a cast of just 11 people and you have 70 characters, they’ll have to do lots of quick changes anyway. So turn it into a virtue rather than a problem!”

The more he thought about it, the more he came to see, “The great advantage is that there is more active engagement with the audience itself because you show that it is all artificial. So it’s up to the audience whether they want to believe and follow it or not. We’re not trying to do tricks in front of them, to trick them into believing something. They have to actively participate, actively suspend their disbelief.”

The Chung Ying Theatre Company will present Cyrano de Bergerac from December 21 to 30 at the HK Cultural Centre’s Studio Theatre. The evening shows commence at 7:30pm while the December 22-26 and 29-30 matinees will begin at 2:30pm. Tickets for the ‘Hand-in-hand’ special afternoon performance
on Sunday, December 30, are $320 to $200 while other shows’ tickets are $200 to $120 from URBTIX, 2734 9009.