Shakespeare in Shijiazhuang

 

We were invited to a local production of Othello,

Chinese opera style.

The director, who adapted the play, would be our host.

He spoke no English, we no Chinese.

We were a group of fourteen

newly arrived and the only foreigners in town.

 

The opera house was old,

or maybe not so much old as it was dilapidated.

There were only seven rows of seats,

the back of the theatre having been amputated

by a hastily constructed wall of rotted plywood,

the layers peeling and bubbling,

trying to escape the grip of what little glue remained.

 

To either side of the theater was a toilet

emitting an angry stench of antique piss and shit.

We held our breaths for as long as possible

then gasped in the tiny wrathful particles

coercing their way through our nostrils to assault

the back of our throats like miniature sledgehammers.

 

Mixed with the feces and urine

were strains of spoiled cooking oil, bean paste and dried fish,

imported by the dozen or so other patrons of the arts,

these smells more powerful, even,

than the musk and deep-seated body odours

seeping from their aged, damp and ratted overcoats

left over from the Mao days of uniform fashion.

 

A translator sat with us, mid row,

seven laowei, foreign devils, to either side.

She tried valiantly to include us all

above the clamour and nasal screeching

that is Chinese Opera.

Mostly we smiled and nodded and she continued

with the full knowledge that we didn’t understand a word.

Maybe she thought if we spoke English we must know Shakespeare.

 

Halfway though the performance we discovered

what lay behind the plywood wall;

from ruptured speakers, juddering and distorting

what once might have passed for music,

wannabe pop stars straight from

government shops and factories and coal dispensers

spewed forth mournful tales of homes left behind

and loved ones lost.

 

In the end, when the opera was over,

we clambered onto the stage,

and stood with the cast to the flash of local press

and the painful echoes of Chinese pop songs.