Author: Cheng Hui
Whitman once wrote about the hope of love with questions in “Song of the Highway”: “Will you give yourself to me/Will you walk with me/Will we be loyal to each other until the end of our lives.” Early winter in Beijing The London West End (China Tour) version of the musical “The Past Five Years” staged at Tianqiao Arts Center made this poem come to mind again.
“The Past Five Years” stills photo by Wang Xiaoxi
Exquisite structure and colorful music
“The Past Five Years”, which was born at the beginning of this century, has many performance versions, from Chicago, Off-Broadway, London’s West End to all over the world. A Chinese version was also performed in China in the past few years. It is small and unique. It explores the origin, surge and loss of love from a love past with a strong sense of personal experience.
This play, written by composer Jason Robert Brown himself, has a very unique way of expression: there are only two actors, male and female, on the stage, each telling the shared journey from his own perspective. The most creative part is that the heroine Casey’s line is narrated in reverse, from the ending of the breakup to the beginning; the male protagonist Jamie’s line is narrated forward, from the starting point of wanting to love and be together regardless of everything. , spreading to the end to write a farewell letter. The two double lines first approach each other, intersect at the node of courtship and wedding vows, and then separate and drift away. The double line movement is the lamentation movement of falling in love and separation, which creates structural emotional tension and gives the formal beauty of the type concept.
In terms of music creation, “The Past Five Years” has a variety of styles. It is more blues and jazz, and combines rock, folk and traditional musical lyrical singing. It’s a simple band, but the texture is very rich, and each instrument has its own “role” to participate in the expression. The heavy weight of instrumental music can effectively provide the support for the performance in the rhythm and the rhythm of the performance, and at the same time become an organic composition of the emotional world of the characters. For example, the keyboard has many light or heavy harmonies, a series of rolling arpeggios, and other instruments play blues and jazz tones, which are closely related to joy, waiting, anxiety, depression, etc. During one of Casey’s interviews, Piano’s perfunctory non-cooperation “acted” the awkwardness of the scene. For another example, the violin plays a monotonous cycle of dissonance many times, always giving a sense of uncertainty, uneasiness, worry, etc., which actively intervenes as an independent emotion, and sometimes is intensified, becoming an indispensable and effective part of the character’s mood and situation. .
In the plot, there are no core events or concrete focus of conflicts. The complicated daily life, different workplace conditions and social encounters, different emotions and life expectations are slowly compared, and the mutual attraction, mutual love, mutual encouragement and anxiety, suspicion, and betrayal are revealed in detail.
Sixteen songs unfold in succession
These bits and pieces accumulated over time are relayed through sixteen independent songs that are similar to diary excerpts. The songs are mainly solos, with a very dense coherence, and occasionally a few lines, which test the actors’ singing skills. The stage presentation is consistent with the literary expression of the screenwriter. The two men and women “sing” and talk to themselves, and the songs are alternately interspersed. This is not a face-to-face real-life dialogue. The two people are separated by time and space and seem to have no corresponding relationship, but they have a secret intertextual effect of contrast.
The intermittent train sound effects and continuous light cuts at the beginning are like a flashback of the journey. After Kathy sang the sad and intrusive first song “Still Heartache”, Jamie would rather let “Grandpa roll in his grave”. The song “Shiksa Goddess”, which desperately rushes to a new life, followed immediately. The huge gap is not only the technical needs of dramatic conflict and stage rhythm, but also provides a stronger motivation for exploring the emotional fate of the characters. Immediately afterwards, Jamie’s career quickly rose, and Cathy’s helplessness, suspicion, and resentment intertwined, making the focus of their conflicts highlighted. Subsequently, Kathy’s soothing “Part of It” and Jamie’s interesting “Schmuhl’s Song” revealed that both of them have tried hard to integrate into each other, and both hope to realize better dreams for the other. Therefore, when the only interaction point in the play, “The Next Ten Ten Minutes”, is introduced, the romance is short-lived, but it comes at the right time and becomes the most emotional point.
Unfortunately, the cruelty of reality comes too quickly. The linked sections of “When You Come Back to Me” and “Miracles Will Happen” after the white rose petals are scattered in the sky. Casey’s career was not going well before marriage, and her dependence on Jamie after marriage caused multiple discomforts. The feeling spread. This section is the most direct and dramatic part of the play. Casey’s traditional Broadway-style audition section is a “song within a play” similar to a “play within a play”, and is also an expression of the character’s spiritual longing. Therefore, in the subsequent arias, Casey added the opening melody of the interview song from time to time. The plot is that the interviews failed one after another and the characters became more and more anxious. In fact, it also expressed the constant overlapping of inner love expectations and dependence. When the music suddenly stopped, Jamie used the scene of reciting his new work to express the exhaustion of both parties, and quietly confided it with the only large line in the whole play, and then introduced “If I Don’t Believe in You”, which became a portrayal of the breakdown of mutual trust. .
If “I Can Do Better” when Casey first fell in love is juxtaposed with “No One Needs to Know” when Jamie finally fell in love with someone else, making people lament the fragility of emotions, then at the end, Casey’s first full of expectations are again When they met, Jamie left the last letter to say goodbye, and frequently used “waiting for you” and “goodbye” to collide. The different light areas of bright red and gloomy blue created a world where there is no intersection between the two separated people, making them feel even more powerless. It’s heavy until the end of the play.
The surprises and shortcomings of the new version
The China tour of “The Past Five Years” is a newer version of London’s West End. Director Jonathan O’Boile’s team has made major adjustments in the presentation method. In the past, the male and female performance areas were relatively divided and sometimes intersected. The central turntable serves as the main stage, with a grand piano on top. The two actors not only have to sing, but also play live. Together with five other musicians, they form a band with double keyboards, violin, electric guitar, bass, and percussion. The overall orchestration also changes accordingly.
The most outstanding thing is not only the superb ability of the actors on stage to sing, act, dance, and play (they also played acoustic guitar and other plucked music respectively), but also turned the piano into an important fulcrum and an object that cannot be interacted with in real life. Common spiritual sustenance. While an actor is accompanying another actor, he is actually using the sound of the piano and the body movements of playing to express his own potential emotional dialogue. For example, the warm four-hand playing in the wedding vows, and the powerful harmonies in the bass range that Casey used to show disobedience when Jamie questioned him, etc., all gave the expression more illocutionary levels. In this regard, the piano has an important symbolic meaning – the piano and the harp do not just sing in harmony. On the piano bench, they hug each other, sit facing each other, or sit opposite each other. It is also the only love hotbed in the play where there is physical intersection.
Either because of the audience’s mindset, or because the screenwriter and director have not yet found a more acceptable way of communicating with viewers in terms of creative expression, the interpretation of clues that are moving forward in “The Past Five Years” has not yet reached a state of perfection. The respective expressions of both characters lack an obvious same subject matter and the different reactions of the characters inspired by it, making it difficult to compare or analogize the two lines immediately and as quickly as possible. Focusing too much or staying in those thoughts will inevitably affect all-round appreciation. In addition, because it talks about daily fragments, the contradictions are scattered, and there is no direct conflict on the stage, which hinders the audience’s in-depth understanding and understanding.
If we say that the structure determines that the narrative should not be too complicated, and if it is too simple, it will be difficult to express the deep emotional pain and the reasons for the situation, and it will easily fall on the surface of life perception, and the contradictions will be difficult to explain. Well, although this version of the performance has amazing stage energy, it aggravates the problems caused by the structure. It is not as good as other versions that use different performance areas to jump in and out, which is more convenient for the audience to understand, accept and digest the time and space. scattered.
Of course, the existence of these problems does not greatly affect my love for this work and the special appeal of this version of the performance. Some things are difficult to have both ways, just like the emotions expressed in the play.
Finally, what needs to be praised is that the sound processing of the play is very appropriate, allowing us to fully appreciate the beauty of simple, simple and extraordinary music creation. On the other hand, in many plays nowadays, when pursuing theater effects, they often mistakenly think that the sound is nothing more than amplification. Not only does the situational attribute be lost, but the aesthetic personality is ignored, sometimes the opera performance can be made like a rock scene. As a necessary component of theater art and expression of works, the professionalism and creative energy of the sound link should be fully understood and highly respected.
(The author is a drama critic)
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责编：刘冰雅 ]
