The Comparatist

Reading the intercultural sign, says Tatlow, involves cultural comparison along the lines of textual anthropology, "observing others and wrestling with ourselves . . . self-distancing . . . from more than one point of view" (1–2). Such self-distancing is necessary not only in Tatlow's world theater studies, but also in cultural studies at any level, as well as in the social sciences and humanities. Tatlow's years of research and teaching as professor and head of comparative literature at the University of Hong Kong make his insights on multicultural theater and opera productions, with their influences and parallels among various cultures, particularly credible and uniquely valuable. Moreover, because of their clarity and the vibrant interest in comparative literature that they evoke, the analyses of intercultural versions of Shakespeare's Coriolanus in German and Macbeth in Chinese (chapters 5 and 6) are certain to interest upper-division undergraduates.

Tatlow favors a poststructuralist reading of Brecht, Shakespeare, and East-Asian theater history and production, while grounding his analyses widely and providing enough background for novice readers. His first four chapters offer anthropological and psychoanalytical perspectives on the interrelationship of codes in performance (audiovisual, proxemic, kinesthetic, and linguistic), with examples from major twentieth-century playwrights, producers, actors, and directors in various media and various subgenres of theater. Chapters 3 to 6 treat comedy, farce, history plays, and tragedies.

Joseph O'Neil's review has already provided an excellent evaluation of the book (Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature 50 [2004]: 194–98). I would like here to pursue one part of the book in more depth. The volume's last chapter analyzes [End Page 161] a particular Kunju (Shanghai opera) staging of Macbeth, the one directed by Tatlow's friend Huang Zuolin. Tatlow shows how the play has been radically transformed through adaptation "to a traditional Chinese performance style" (198).

Tatlow finds Huang Zuolin's 1987 Kunju production fascinating: "[It] interrupts the empirical and conventional readings of the play with a constructed, stylized performance that stops . . . automatic and familiar Western responses dead in their tracks. . . . The intercultural sign is most productive when it unsettles all conventions" (194). Tatlow has consulted program notes and reviews from England, Ireland, and France on different performances of the same Kunju production, and he looks at it in the context of other East-Asian theater and film of the 1990's. He outlines the beginning of an interesting comparison between the Kunju version of Macbeth and Kurosawa's film Throne of Blood, looking at differences between Buddhist and Western concepts and the cultures of everyday life (215–217). Tatlow then summarizes Huang Zuolin's directing principles thus: "The theater has to externalize the subjective into the range of its . . . totality . . . of constructed relations that are always in process. . . . We then look into the movement of a performance text and understand how culture constructs the totality of these processes" (218).

A particular strength of the final chapter is its attention to music. In China, Tatlow reminds us, music and gestures are more important relative to words than in Western theater. Music moves us most deeply, words most rapidly, and visual codes most memorably, he writes. Kunju music is closer to Western music than jingju music (Peking opera) in several ways: jingju consists of "melismatic . . . isomorphic rhythmical reiteration" of melodies in the pentatonic scale (the same for each instrument). Kunju "adapted Indo-Asian melodies [that] originated among tribes . . . near the Burmese border." These lyrical folk melodies show greater rhythmical variation and harmonic effects that are not available to jingju. Similarly, Kunju theater accompanies the emotions expressed through song with a more expressive dance style than jingju (189–200).

Tatlow also approaches stagings comparatively. The witches in Macbeth are more dramatically costumed and more prominent than in Western versions of the play; they strike poses and move by dancing and acrobatics. "One side of their heads encourages his desire, the other side evaluates it. They are visibly 'double,' like the linguistic metaphors in Shakespeare's play" (201). Lady Macbeth, "although sleep-walking[,] externalizes the unconscious. . . ." Ghosts of people she has murdered "literally appear before her eyes and torment her. . . . they close in on her, and she collapses at the end of a long series of whirling movements that cut off all mental escape. The constriction is physically palpable" (209). To tie staging conventions together, Tatlow quotes the opera company's brochure: "Spectacle replaces Shakespeare's penetrating characterization"; but he suggests that spectacle may actually [End Page 162] "relocate and reinforce characterization, rather than replace it" (201), adding depth to our understanding.

What really fascinates Tatlow about Kunju opera versions of Shakespeare is that they translate Shakespeare's attention to detail of character into equally subtle gestures (210–212). Tatlow hopes eventually to "connect specific gestural moments to an interpretive strategy, thus binding the particular to a theorizable intention." He envisions a postmodern intercultural theater that explores and "situate[s] a cultural unconscious," extending our horizons past the Western culture to which we are accustomed (31–35).

The point of Tatlow's volume is ultimately utopian and indicative rather than analytic. By showing how to paint pictures of intercultural research, Tatlow expects communication among world cultures to increase through what he calls the "dialectics of acculturation" (230–231). He hopes that productions in cultural and linguistic translation will reach our unconscious minds and encourage us to "relocate ourselves as readers of texts and interpreters of culture" (189). His fascinating vignettes point to areas for future research in which theories need to be evolved for understanding intercultural sensibility and cultural contact.