Review-Green Snake-Hong Kong Arts Fest
22-3-13
By: Tom Hope
In ‘Snakes & Ladders’, the snakes are the ones that bring you down from a great height. ‘Green Snake’ does this too, in more ways than one – some good, some not so good.
There are actually two snakes to this tale – one white, one green. The twist in their sisterly serpentine spirit tails is a shared desire to be human and experience human desires. Transformed into ravishing female form, the white one falls for a nice young man with whom she seems destined to live happily ever after – but the green one falls for a Buddhist monk whose determination to remain celibate leaves her predictably frustrated and (less predictably) frustrates her sister’s head, heart and happiness too.
Based on Hong Kong writer Li Bihua’s novel of the same name, the almost-all-female creative team for this National Theatres of China and Scotland co-production (the music is by David Paul Jones: everyone else – director, writers, set and lighting designers etc – is a woman) has conjured out of this Sung dynasty fable a meditation on cross-gender sexuality, the inherent paradoxes of Buddhist v. Taoist teachings and our fatal tendency to want always what we can’t have. A stunning set, lavish lighting and well-sculpted soundscapes kick start the show, and throughout the first half the cast deliver the goods with verve, style and humour, a 6 strong male ensemble worthy foils to the ‘snake star sisters’ of Qin Hailu and Yuan Quan, each currently riding high on the crest of mainland celebrity waves for their film and theatre work. And this high octane momentum is maintained for much of the second half.
For me, though, there are two unfortunate flaws.
First, the archetypal characters remain archetypes, so by the close it’s hard to care about the fate of the snake sisters and their beloveds, as they ask each other over and over whether they really could love each other forever. This may not have mattered so much for Mandarin speakers in the audience, most of whom kept laughing in places where the surtitles gave little hint of the humour and who may have been more generally gripped by the untranslated dialogue. For me, with a lot of visual text to process, there seemed little development and much repetition of sentiment.
Second, the show is too long – over 3 hours, plus a 15 minute interval, for what could have been packed into two thirds of the time. Moving into its fourth hour, I longed for it to demonstrate rather more succinctly how all things must pass.
Whilst always beautiful to behold and often intelligently accomplished in its rendition, ‘Green Snake’ smacks of self indulgence. A lot less could have been made of the more and been a whole lot more telling in consequence.
Green Snake is playing through March 24th. For more information, click here.
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