In an interview the day after he gave the ‘Existentialism Is a Humanism’ lecture at the Club maintenant in Paris on 28 October 1945 (only a few months after the Second World War had ended), Jean-Paul Sartre said that for about a year he had been thinking of writing a play on a contemporary subject: ‘The characters themselves have been down the road to freedom. The action takes place in an underground unit. The theme of the play is what I'll call, for the lack of a better word, heroism. I'll try to show what is total about heroism’.Footnote 2
Sartre would write the new play near the end of the year, and call it Les vainqueurs (The Victors), or Morts sans sépulture (The Unburied Dead), as the play has been known since. About a year later, in an interview with Combat (a clandestine French newspaper created for the Resistance during the Second World War) on 30 October 1946, Sartre had this to say about the new play, which was to premiere at the Théâtre Antoine on 8 November: ‘What interests me are borderline situations and the reactions of those thrust into them. For a while I thought about having my play take place during the Spanish Civil War. It could just as well take place in China.’Footnote 3 This interview suggests that although torture had been on Sartre's mind for quite some time,Footnote 4 there was apparently some rethinking or shift of the thematic focus from ‘heroism’ (‘what is total about heroism’) to ‘borderline situations’, or situation-limite (‘extreme situation’).
The play is set in 1944, during the Allied invasion of Normandy.Footnote 5 Five French Resistance fighters – Henri, Canoris, Sorbier, Lucie and François – are captured by the Vichy milice (militia) during a failed attack and tortured viciously for the whereabouts of their leader (Jean). Jailed in a schoolroom and facing certain death, they each choose to react differently, out of his or her sense of honour, pride, dignity or fear. Worried that he will not be able to bear the excruciating torture any more, Sorbier chooses to jump from the window of the jail to his death. All but certain that François, her fifteen-year-old brother, will succumb to fear and betray Jean (the man she loves), Lucie lets Henri kill the young boy to silence him. Toward the end of the play, clinging to a glimmer of hope for life and for the future, Henri, Canoris and Lucie choose to feign collaboration with their Vichy captors, only to be betrayed and gunned down by one of the officers when they are about to step outside the schoolroom-turned-jail where three hundred people – Resistance fighters and villagers – lie dead, unburied.Footnote 6
The 1946 premiere of Les vainqueurs turned out to be quite a failure, even in Sartre's own estimation. The torture scenes in the second tableau caused cries of ‘Murderers!’, faintings and walkouts by audience members, and led to newspaper headlines like ‘Scandal in Paris’ condemning the play.Footnote 7 Nonetheless, the play had an impressive run of 180 performances, including its English translation staged at the Lyric Theatre in the West End of London in 1947 and New Stages Theatre in New York in 1948.Footnote 8 Then, Les vainqueurs, or Morts sans sépulture, all but disappeared from the theatre scene until the 1980s, when it was revived in Paris as French conscience remained afflicted by the endemic use of torture by its military during the Algerian War (1954–62) and elsewhere.Footnote 9
The 1997 Chinese theatrical production of Morts sans sépulture was mounted in Beijing, China, where the reception of the play by literary critics has experienced a rethinking or shift too, from exuberant celebration of the perceived heroism in the 1980s to a more nuanced appreciation of the existentialist themes as embodied in the play.Footnote 10 The 1997 production of Morts sans sépulture was based on a reading that resonated more with what Sartre himself had probably meant by, for want of a better term, total heroism. The play is not a celebration of what is conventionally understood as heroism (for example, of the French Resistance fighters during the Second World War, or of martyrs mythologized in the annals of the Chinese Communist Revolution, 1921–49), but an interrogation of what it means to be human (morally and philosophically) tested in the crucible of ferocious torture. For Zha Mingzhe, often dubbed ‘Cruel Director’ (canku daoyan; an apparent play on Artaud's concept of ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ thanks to his directorial work with Sartre's Morts sans sépulture and a few other similarly themed plays), such a hard and honest look at total heroism – an ‘unheroic’ kind of heroism, so to speak – is a humanism in the Sartrean sense of the term. It is an optimism based on an uncompromising faith in the agency of every human being to realize oneself, one's humanity, through action and through the choices one makes.
This article examines Zha Mingzhe's theatrical reinterpretation of Sartre's Morts sans sépulture based on the video of the 2005 revival production (with the same cast from the 1997 production). It proceeds with a brief overview of the sociocultural context for Zha's theatrical reinterpretation and the critical reception of Sartre's play in China. The article pays particular attention to how the performance text resonates with the dramatic text as written by Sartre, and to what extent it achieves what Zha sets out to do with this theatrical reinterpretation.
Sociocultural context
By 1997, two decades after China began to open up to the world and embark on economic reforms when the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) finally ended, the country had seen significant development in its economy, education, science and technology. Demands for more sociopolitical reforms led to the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, which ended in bloodshed. Sociopolitical stability was not restored to ensure economic growth until the ‘1992 southern tour’ of Deng Xiaoping (1904–97), the chief architect of China's economic reforms and of China's socialist modernization, who had retired in 1987. During this tour Deng gave several speeches to prod the country to continue on its path of ‘opening up and reforms’. A catchphrase purportedly used by Deng during this tour was ‘To get rich is glorious’, which unleashed a new era of feverish pursuit of personal and material success and unbridled appetite for popular culture and consumer goods (especially among the nouveau riche and the middle class).Footnote 11
With the production of Sartre's Morts sans sépulture, Zha wanted to shine a glimmer of light, of hope, of optimism for the future when much of the country seemed to have lost its way in mindless material pursuits and petty, personal indulgences. It was a ‘cruel’ antidote, as Zha put it, which was much needed to shock the numbed nerves of the body politic.Footnote 12 Zha's ‘total-heroism’ reinterpretation could still be perceived by some as a ‘misreading’ of the Sartre play because it seems more interested in ‘dramatizing’ than in ‘philosophizing’ and Morts sans sépulture is supposed to be a philosophical play after all.Footnote 13 However, as will be discussed below, by means of an added prologue, retooled dialogues, hard-edged stage design and nerve-wrecking blasts of music and sound effects, Zha's production succeeds in what he and his team set out to do: a two-hour-long, relentless, ‘cruel’ theatric experience of ‘total heroism’, of what it ultimately means to be human. It keeps the audience on the edge of their seats and, as the relentless torture continues on the stage, they are being interrogated too.
From exuberance to nuance: critical reception of Morts sans sépulture in China
When Sartre made a two-month visit with Simone de Beauvoir to China in autumn 1955,Footnote 14 no one could have predicted that one day his name and the school of philosophy associated with him would hit China like a storm. Indeed, the early 1980s in China was a time when the cult-like Sartre fever (sate re) raged across the country among intellectuals and college students. The old leftist ideology, predicated on continued revolutions led by Mao Zedong (1893–1976), which had inflicted deep psychic as well as physical wounds on the nation, had lost its grip. Young intellectuals were anxiously looking for a new faith to fill the spiritual void and to give meaning to their existence. Sartre's ‘existence precedes essence’, ‘hell is other people’, ‘condemned to be free’, and similar existentialist maxims were zealously embraced as a philosophy for life and a code for conduct.Footnote 15
It was in 1982, during these early days of gaige kaifang (‘reform and opening up’), qimeng (‘intellectual enlightenment’) and Sartre fever that a Chinese translation of Morts sans sépulture, rendered by Shen Zhiming, under the title Si wu zangshen zhi di (Dead with No Burial Ground), was published and enthusiastically received. One central question many Chinese critics posed with regard to the play then was whether the five French Resistance fighters (maquisards) were heroes. Another question, closely related, was who dies with no burial ground, as indicated in the title for the Chinese translation. Coming from what later scholars would call a ‘hero complex’ (yingxiong qingjie),Footnote 16 inculcated by stories of the real and mythologized heroism of revolutionary martyrs during the first half of the twentieth century, many early Chinese critics saw the Resistance fighters as worthy of the glorious title of heroes. These fighters chose (freely) not to succumb and surrender when facing ferocious torture from the enemy and certain death. This exuberant celebration of heroism, however, was somewhat tempered by the moments of weakness, sorrow and despair shown by some of the Resistance fighters, especially François and Sorbier. Chinese critics attributed this ‘flaw’ in the play to the limitations of Sartre's bourgeois ideology, namely individualism (geren zhuyi) and ‘love-above-all-ism’ (aiqing zhishang zhuyi).Footnote 17 However, on balance, the Resistance fighters do conduct themselves heroically. They are willing to die for their cause and for victory. They die a worthy death and can ‘go home’ again although their bodies will be exposed under the naked sun. By the same logic, early Chinese critics saw the Vichy torturers as the ones condemned to die with no burial ground because they were ‘Fascist running dogs’ who had betrayed their country, their people and their freedom and thus deserved to die such an ignominious death.Footnote 18
Sartre fever, like the new enlightenment movement that had swept across the country, soon cooled off in post-Tiananmen Square China (1989). If condemned not to be free to choose their sociopolitical future, people seemed to conclude, they were at least free – more or less – to get rich first and pursue happiness through other personal goals concerning education, housing, career and so on. Nonetheless, interest in plays by Sartre (as well as by Albert Camus, Eugene Ionesco, Samuel Beckett and other Western playwrights) persisted. Indeed, Chinese interpretations of Morts sans sépulture have since become more nuanced based on closer readings of the text of the play in the context of Sartre's enunciations of his existentialist philosophy. Recent Chinese interpretations are more attentive to issues of moral and ethical paradox or self-contradictions (beilun) in human existence as posed by (or imposed upon) the extreme conditions presented in the play.Footnote 19 Although some of the more recent interpretations still see the Resistance fighters as heroes, albeit ‘flawed heroes’,Footnote 20 others brush aside the heroism issue completely to focus on complex philosophical questions such as the impossibility of real, meaningful free choice under the extreme situations of jail and imminent death, which seems to render essentially absurd and futile whatever free choice the Resistance fighters may have, such as whether or not to cooperate with their torturers.Footnote 21 Others are interested in understanding how Sartre succeeds in presenting a parable-like philosophical play (yuyan ju) so realistically as to probe deeply into questions of free choice, honour and dignity, meaning and absurdity, and accident and necessity, all painfully entangled in the same extreme situations.Footnote 22 It is in the context of these more nuanced reinterpretations of the Sartre play that Zha Mingzhe mounted his 1997 production.
Reinterpretation by ‘Cruel Director’
In a 2009 interview Zha Mingzhe recalled an interesting detail about his 1997 production of Sartre's Morts sans sépulture, as if it were a belated but still reassuring confirmation of his interpretation and his directorial approach: he did not know that the title for the English translation of the play was The Victors (although there are at least two other lesser-known English titlesFootnote 23) until after the show was already over.Footnote 24 Choosing Sartre's Morts sans sépulture as his directorial debut after returning to Beijing from Moscow with a PhD degree was a bold move on Zha's part. Sartre fever had blown itself out some time previously. What seemed to reign on the theatre scene at the time was lighthearted (often melodramatic) entertainment, so people might not be in the mood for a play like Morts sans sépulture that is brutally serious and lacks the kind of simple, hero-versus-villain-type moral clarity that Chinese theatre-goers had become used to.
Zha and his team took considerable creative license, in the form of retooled dialogues, hard-edged stage design, the moody interjection of music and a brutal acoustic facsimile of torture, to reimagine the Sartre play for Chinese audiences and to achieve the artistic as well as socio-moral vision he had set for the production. The gamble paid off and launched Zha's career as a serious and consequential artist. Si wu zangshen zhi di was staged in the 180-seat small theatre of the Central Experimental Theatre (which merged into the National Theatre Company of China in 2001). More than two hundred people came for the opening night; some had to sit so close to the stage that they were inches away from where the intense dramatic action was happening – quite a phenomenal cultural event in the capital of the country where people had seen it all. A revival production was staged eight years later in 2005, which was followed by yet another revival in 2014.Footnote 25 Chinese audiences of all of these productions see and experience the excruciatingly intense drama unfolding right before their eyes on the little theatre stage as did the audiences on the opening night in 1997.
As the curtain draws open in a packed, dimly lit small theatre,Footnote 26 we see a small stage with a tricolour flag hanging in the background. With a loud whistle, and to the accompaniment of lively accordion music, a group of Second World War French Resistance fighters enter from stage left in single file, waving to the audience. Stage light brightens, showing them to be (as we will soon find out, with actors’ names in parentheses) Sorbier (Liao Fan), in shirt, vest and suspenders; Henri (Xu Wei), tall, with a thick head of long hair, bespectacled and dressed in camouflage uniform with a red scarf tucked inside; Jean (Han Tongsheng), with a short haircut, dressed in woolly officer uniform, a holstered pistol strapped on his right shoulder; Canoris (Wang Weiguo), with a buzz cut and sideburns, the huskiest of them all, and carrying a rifle on his left shoulder; and a lively François (Li Hua), much younger, having on a bright yellow jacket, who climbs on higher ground at the back, waving a leafy branch. They all wear a red armband on their left arms.
As Sorbier, Henri, Jean and Canoris line up downstage, just a few feet from the front-row audience members in the packed small theatre, they break into a Chinese rendition of ‘A Paris dans chaque faubourg’ (In Every Suburb of Paris), the theme song of Quatorze juillet (July 14), a 1933 French film:
As they sing, François runs offstage into the middle aisle and leads Lucie (Feng Xianzhen) – who has on a long skirt, a uniform vest, a scarf wrapped around her hair and a red armband – to the front. She takes over the song and sings (solo) and swings for half a minute and then joins her comrades on the stage. She continues to sing and dance, with the men clapping and providing the refrains, she and Jean waltzing together, gazing into each other's eyes tenderly, Henri and François pairing up too, the much taller Henri removing his long red scarf and caringly putting it around the younger man's neck.
Although this opening scene throbs with French music and song, its ambience is recognizably Chinese, especially for those in the audience familiar with canonical Chinese revolutionary stories, such as Dihou wugong dui (Armed Detachment behind the Enemy Lines) by Feng Zhi (1958).Footnote 28 This ‘red classic’ (hongse jingdian), which has been made into both a film and a television drama series, tells the story of a unit of Communist special forces fighting the Japanese invaders and their Chinese collaborators (hanjian, weijun, Chinese counterparts of the Vichy miliciens) during the Second World War. Indeed, the opening scene brims with what the Chinese would, for much of the twentieth century, call the spirit of revolutionary romanticism, namely buoyant, celebratory and uplifting depiction of revolutionary heroes who are ready to lay down their lives for their ideals.Footnote 29
The joyful song and dance last for almost three full minutes when they are interrupted by sudden volleys of explosive gunfire and spasms of bloody red light. Then there is deadly silence and darkness for a few seconds – feeling like an eternity. When light finally comes back on, we see the silhouetted figures of the five Resistance fighters (minus Jean) upstage, their hands pushed up against the wall, their backs to the audience, a spotlight from above beating down on each of them. A hoarse voice shouts, ‘Take them to the attic!’ Then the five Resistance fighters, hands in chains, are marched up a long, narrow metal stairway to the attic, their jail, each heavy, staggering step punctuated by a loud, nerve-wracking metallic sound. Another full minute of deadly silence and darkness later, we see the opening scene as described by Sartre in his play:
An attic lighted by a dormer window. A hodge-podge of all sorts of things: trunks, an old stove, a dressmaker's dummy. canoris and sorbier are sitting, one on a trunk, and the other on an old stool. lucie is sitting on the stove. All are handcuffed. françois paces back and forth. He is handcuffed too. henri is stretched out on the floor, asleep.Footnote 30
This six-minute long prologue, grafted onto the play by Zha for the Chinese production, serves to introduce the Resistance fighters (including the romantic relationship between Jean and Lucie and the special brotherly bond between Henri and François), and sets the stage for what is about to unfold because (as is well known) Chinese theatre-goers typically need a clear story arc to follow. More importantly, it establishes an upbeat tone of romantic heroism for the entire play and wins over the audience both morally and emotively; they will root for the imprisoned Resistance fighters, feel their fear, their despair, their agonizing choices, and indeed their ultimate (albeit flawed) heroism, and understand even when some of them (such as Sorbier, and more particularly, François) succumb to the petrifying terror. As the humanity of each of the five Resistance fighters is being interrogated on the stage, right before their eyes, the audience find themselves drawn into the same existential crisis and face the same existential question: how they each would choose if condemned to the same excruciating torture and pending death.
In order for Chinese audiences to follow and for the dramatic action to move at a brisker pace, the Zha production of Morts sans sépulture compressed many of the dialogues in the Shen Zhiming rendition of the script. The dialogues in the segment of discussion below are quoted from Sartre, the strikethroughs indicating deleted elements in the Chinese production. For example, when the jailed Resistance fighters talk about how misguided orders from their commanders led to the disastrous outcome, Sorbier says,
I know. But we should have (succeeded) just the same [A pause] Three hundred. Three hundred people who didn't want to die. and who died for nothing. They are lying among the stones, and the sun blackens them; they must be visible from every window. Because of us. Because of us. There are only troopers, dead men, and stones in that village. It'll be hard to kick off with those screams.Footnote 31
A few moments later, when François cannot take it any more, pacing around like an ant on a hot stove (to use a Chinese expression), Lucie, his sister, tries to calm and comfort him:
Rest your head on my knees. Yes, everything is so hard and you are so young only 15 years old. If only someone could still smile at you and say: ‘My poor kid.’ I used to take care of all your troubles. My poor kid – my poor kid. [She suddenly straightens up.] I can't any more. Anguish has drained me dry. I can't cry any more.Footnote 32
Editing the dialogue as shown above serves not only to quicken the pace of dramatic action, but also to remove some of the less ‘heroic’ touches in the ambiance of the scene and in the portrayal of characters. When Sorbier, unnerved by the suspenseful wait before their jailers come and take them to the torture chamber downstairs, Canoris, the well-built and toughened Greek, thus answers in his deep, calm voice:
sorbier: Is it a mistake? Waiting is no joke when you get ideas.
canoris: That's true enough. But on the other hand you have time to collect yourself. My first time was in Greece, under Metaxas. They came to arrest me at four o'clock in the morning. If they had worked on me a bit I would have talked. Out of surprise. But they didn't ask me a thing. Ten days later they tried everything, but it was too late; they had lost the surprise effect.Footnote 33
The admission that ‘if they had worked on me a bit I would have talked’ was taken out presumably because it would have somehow taken away from the ‘hero’ image of Canoris, the strongest of the five, who, regardless of when the torture happened, surprise effect or not, should not have talked.Footnote 34 Then, the story Canoris tells of how he was tortured in Greece and what happened to traitors to the cause, which takes four pages of dialogue (about four minutes of stage time) between him and his fellow prisoners to complete,Footnote 35 is compressed to a fraction of the original length to speed up the dramatic action.
However, Zha refrained from compressing or dispensing with key dialogues in order to maintain an untarnished ‘hero’ stature for the Resistance fighters. Take, for example, the character of Henri, the twenty-nine-year-old medical-school student. Imprisoned in this cramped space and facing certain death, the only thing left for him is to win. However, in the battle of wills with his jailers – whether he will scream in unbearable pain when tortured by the sadistic Clochet and his men – Henri ‘loses’ despite his will power and the fierce fight he puts up. Then, Henri kills François when it becomes certain that the young man, shattered by fear, will denounce Jean, their commander, who has been arrested and thrown into the same schoolroom-turned-jail by mistake. It is an impossible moral dilemma that Henri faces, together with Canoris, Jean and Lucie, namely that taking one life – of a young boy they all love – will supposedly save the lives of sixty other Resistance fighters under Jean's command. In the original script, the killing of François takes only a few lines of description.
In the Zha production, it takes five minutes of stage time to complete. Accompanied by music from the execution scene near the end of Act III of Puccini's La Tosca, Henri, together with Canoris, who has also undergone ferocious torture, limps toward a panicky François, who runs all over the stage for his life and then into the auditorium, crying out to the audience for help (‘Jiujiu wo! jiujiu wo!’ – ‘Save me! Save me!’). Henri finally gets hold of François onstage, pushes the boy down on the floor, and takes him by the throat with his big (albeit broken), still-chained hands. Then, his face twitching in pain, horror and resolve, accompanied by the last notes Tosca sings with a broken heart upon finding that Mario Cavaradossi, the man she loves, has actually been executed despite her scheme to save him, Henri puts the boy out of his misery by tightening the red scarf (which he gave François in the opening scene) around his neck.
It is a brutally tragic moment in the short history of the jailed Resistance fighters that would fit perfectly with the ethos and pathos of what the Chinese would call dayimieqin (to kill one's kin out of righteousness), one of the celebrated virtues (especially of people in powerful positions) that can be traced back to the Spring and Autumn period (771–476 BC). When Jean accuses Henri of having killed François out of pride, Henri denies it flat out. Towards the end of the play, the remaining Resistance fighters, Canoris, Henri and Lucie, debate amongst themselves whether to feign collaboration in order to have a chance to live again. When Canoris says, ‘we have no right to die for nothing’, Henri responds, ‘And why not? Why not? They broke my wrists, they tore open my flesh: haven't I paid for the right to die? We've won. Why do you ask me to begin life again when I can die at peace with myself?’Footnote 36 Contrary to what one might expect, Zha kept this unexpected, yet most important, confession from Henri that comes next:
canoris: The sky is completely overcast. It will be a good shower.
henri: (Abruptly) It was out of pride.
canoris: What?
henri: The kid. I think I killed him out of pride.
canoris: Why dwell on that? He had to die.
henri: I'll drag that doubt around like a ball and chain. Every minute of my life I'll suspect myself. [A pause] I can't do it! I can't live.Footnote 37
This confession, or rather recognition (suggestive of anagnorisis in a classic tragedy), is followed by Henri, on his knees, face to the audience, looking up to an overcast sky, delivering this line inserted by Zha: ‘Oh, Heaven, why are you so dark?!’
Another emotively charged moment in the production, dramatized with tragic symphonic background music, is when Henri seems to come to terms with himself and lay bare his soul (reminiscent of the final judgement that Kurtz in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness puts on himself: ‘The horror! The horror!’). The audience, however, might not agree with Henri completely in this harsh judgement of himself and wonder whether pride alone could explain even half of the truth of what has happened.
Crucible of extremes and ‘total heroism’
Other than the romantically themed opening added by Zha Mingzhe and his team, the two-hour long Chinese production of Morts sans sépulture is a relentless, voracious test for each of the five Resistance fighters. For Sorbier, for example, it is to find out about his true self; for Jean, to choose between leaving the jail to supposedly save the lives of the remaining sixty fighters under his command and staying to reconnect with Lucie, the woman he loves, and to rejoin the band of brothers forged anew via the crucible of bloody tortures; and for François, a young man, to realize whether the Resistance movement is not much more than a song-and-dance party and whether there is any ‘hero’ material in him at all. This Chinese production directed by Zha captures the existentialist theme of condemned freedom through its overarching jail motif in the hard-edged stage design. The Resistance fighters are ‘condemned to be free’, to a kind of freedom of choice when there are no really good choices; however, what and how they choose still says much about their humanity (‘existence precedes essence’).
It is a two-tiered structure: the schoolroom-turned-torture-chamber downstairs (which has an inner, tighter space for even more horrific torture) and the attic upstairs where the Resistance fighters are locked up. It is a jail in the physical, psychological, as well as existential, sense, where the Resistance fighters suffer horrific tortures and fight battles of wills within themselves, with each other and with their enemy. For Sorbier, for example, whose spirit is all but broken for most of his short stint here, what really matters is finding out who he is: ‘I'd like to know myself. I knew that they'd get me in the end, and I knew that someday I'd have my back against the wall, face to face with myself, without escape.’Footnote 38
Towards the end of Act II, having suffered another round of ferocious torture (one of his fingernails having just been pulled out), Sorbier hits upon a scheme to escape from it all by tricking his jailers into believing that he is ready to tell in exchange for his life. Upon gaining access to the window of the inner torture chamber that opens to the outside, Sorbier declares victory euphorically:
sorbier: I won! Come near and I jump. I won! I won!
clochet: Don't be a fool. If you talk we'll let you off.
sorbier: Don't feed me that line! (Shouting) Hey, up there! Henri, Canoris, I didn't talk. [The troopers make a grab for him. He leaps out of the window.] Good night!Footnote 39
Sorbier jumps off the window into the world outside, where, among the stones, lie the sun-blackened bodies of three hundred people who have ‘died for nothing’.Footnote 40 But can anyone say that Sorbier died for nothing and deny him the sense of victory and indeed the heroism in this final act of his, chosen freely (yet not really freely)?
Indeed, it would be hard for the audience to answer ‘no’ to Lucie, when, the downpour outside having reawakened in her the desire to live, she breaks the fourth wall to address the audience directly: ‘Look at me. Smile at me. It's so long since I've seen anyone smile. Have we done right?’Footnote 41 In the original play by Sartre, Lucie directs the same question to Canoris again, who gives her an affirmative and reassuring answer: ‘We're doing what is right. We must live.’Footnote 42 In the Zha Mingzhe production, it is Lucie, Henri and Canoris who, in chorus, ask the audience the same question again directly: ‘Have we really done right?’Footnote 43
For this last scene of the play in the original script, we do not see Henri, Canoris and Lucie any more after they are hustled out by the troops. The volley of explosive gunfire tells us that they have not made it. In the Zha version of the ending, however, thanks to the two-tiered jail stage design, we see the last three Resistance fighters trudging up the narrow, steep stairway back to their jail cell and together chalking up a gigantic V on the wall before being gunned down from behind. For the Resistance fighters (with the exception of Jean, whose escape, as choreographed by Sartre, is possible, albeit not entirely probable), the only way out is death. Nonetheless, even though they have not escaped physically, it would be absurd to deny Henri, Canoris and Lucie their sense of victory and indeed their heroism and insist that the choice they made, after much agonizing, is rendered void of meaning by the deadly outcomes. It would be absurd to believe that such extreme situations, when physical freedom cannot be had and death cannot be escaped, all but nullify the battles of wills they have waged within themselves, with each other and with their enemy.
Also imprisoned inside this ironclad jail structure without any real hope of escape are the jailers themselves: Pellerin (Wang Nan), Clochet (Li Mengnan) and Landriev (Niu Piao). In the Zha production, these villainous characters are portrayed with as much nuance as described in the Sartre play. They are not cut from the same cloth; they bicker among themselves; they each struggle with their own demons, although, as described in the original script, Clochet proves to be the most sadistic and lethally treacherous. Despite the thin veneer of pumped-up bravado in the presence of their prisoners, these jailers are cowardly inside, as Sorbier tells Clochet during his second interrogation in Act II: ‘Your eyes will look like that [a coward] when they hang you … It is not me you are torturing. It's yourself.’Footnote 44
After listening to the radio broadcasting the fake news that the ‘German troops are holding firm’, Landrieu admits to Pellerin, ‘We're cooked.’Footnote 45 However, despite the melancholy streak in his personality, a sense of disillusionment, doom and even a cynical, tragic sense of life (‘We're all fools’Footnote 46), Landriev leads the gang in torturing the prisoners and sexually assaulting Lucie (as she confronts him and his men about this in a scene towards the end of the play).
In this two-tiered metal structure, the mettle of each of the imprisoned Resistance fighters – and, for that matter, the mettle of each of their jailers too – is being tested every moment of their existence, each giving a different answer. Near the very end of the Zha production, right before Henri, Canoris and Lucie have a chance to step outside the jail to freedom, they are hit from behind again and again by volleys of gunfire, and fall down in slow motion, statuesque, their bodies wrapped in spasms of bloody red light. There arises in the air an old recording of ‘A Paris dans chaque faubourg’ sung by a female French singer:
The song, along with the church bell striking in the distance, like a requiem, comforts the souls of the fallen although their bodies may not receive proper burial. The world darkens as the ironclad schoolroom-turned-jail dissolves in the music of love, youth and hope.
Music figures quite a lot in the script of Sartre's Morts sans sépulture and even more pervasively in the Zha production. In addition to ‘A Paris dans chaque faubourg’ used as the theme song that opens the play and reasserts the love and heroism theme at various junctures in the dramatic action, the Zha production draws on music from a range of classical musicians, including Richard Wagner (1813–83), Johann Strauss Jr (1825–99), Maurice Ravel (1875–1937) and Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924).Footnote 48 Music plays multiple important roles in the Zha production: as a tormenting reminder of the extreme situation the captives find themselves in; as an objective correlative, for want of a better term, that vocalizes the captives’ tormented states of mind; and/or as an ironic counterpoint or juxtaposition of incongruities in the excruciating epic battle of wills unfolding on the stage.
In the opening scene of the original script, François paces around anxiously and then asks Sorbier to say something: ‘Anything at all, as long as you make some noise.’Footnote 49 As if to grant his wish, a ‘sudden shrill burst of popular music’Footnote 50 erupts from the radio on the floor below. From then on, blasts of music from the radio downstairs invade the attic upstairs capriciously, getting on the nerves of the prisoners and making them jumpy. The captors themselves, as shown in Act II, are not exactly comforted by the music from the radio either. They bicker and fight over the radio frequently, turning it on or off, up or down. The radio, the only connection to the world outside their imprisoned existence, plays a java (to which tune Henri, in the attic upstairs, dances with a dummy), waltzes, operatic melodies, or simply news broadcasts. Landrieu, the leader of the gang, has a rather troubled relationship with the radio, too; he wants to know the latest about the war yet cannot bear what he actually hears and therefore responds fitfully.
As discussed earlier, variations of the romantic heroism and love motif are played at several momentous junctures in the play. This motif plays softly in the background to accompany Lucie as she is escorted downstairs to be tortured. It plays when Jean frets about the indignity Lucie must be suffering at the hands of the male Vichy miliciens. It plays when Jean tries to reawaken love in Lucie after her torture and the death of François:
lucie: … Now go away!
jean: (Falling on his knees) Lucie! Let me stay with you. You won't feel lonely when I am with you here …Footnote 51
They both look up and gaze toward the distance, their faces awash with the deep rosy light, soft theme music oozing in the air:
lucie: Not lonely? With you? Oh, Jean didn't you understand? We have nothing in common any more.
jean: Have you forgotten that I love you?
lucie: It was someone else you loved.
jean: It's you … Perhaps you are another person. In that case it's this other person that I love now and tomorrow I shall love the dead person you will be. It's you I love, Lucie, you, happy or unhappy, alive or dead. It's you.
The soft romantic music, now jarringly juxtaposed with the speech between Lucie and Jean, projects an ironic counterpoint (not necessarily rebuttal) to the buoyant ambience of the opening scene of the play and to another earlier scene when, accompanied by a variation of the same romantic-themed music, Lucie, in an attempt to comfort François, speaks of Jean as one who will live and carry on the dream.
Another notable scene in which a variation of the theme music appears is when Sorbier feigns collaboration with the enemy to escape the indignity of more ferocious torture. This happens when he is in the torture chamber for the second time, has just suffered the excruciating pain of a fingernail being pulled out, and is down on the ground. It is a moment of clarity for Sorbier when he realizes that he cannot survive any more torture without compromising his integrity. As he slowly lifts his head and struggles on his feet, Sorbier ‘hears’ faint notes of the theme music playing somewhere. The theme music occasionally gathers momentum although it never rises to a crescendo. It follows him when Sorbier finally jumps into the dark night outside the window. It is a tribute, albeit low-keyed, from Zha and his team, paid to Sorbier for heroism, flawed as it is, and to dignity reasserted in the last moment of his life.
This is in contrast with how Sorbier, in earlier scenes, all but paralysed by fear, is associated with music. For example, about sixteen minutes into the play, when Sorbier and Carnoris talk about what it is like to be tortured, Johann Strauss Jr's ‘Thunder and Lightning Polka’ (‘Unter Donner und Blitz’) blares up from the radio downstairs, or rather in the head of Sorbier. As the deafening thunder and lightning, evoked through incessant timpani rolls and cymbal crashes, explodes, Sorbier cowers and covers his ears with trembling hands.
Another piece of Johann Strauss Jr's music that appears several times in the production is ‘The Blue Danube’, which is as popular in China as in the West. It first appears about seventeen minutes into the production, in association with Henri, when the ‘Thunder and Lightning Polka’ ends abruptly and he speaks for the first time: ‘What's up? [A pause.] It is our turn to dance now.’ As if on cue, the first note of ‘The Blue Danube’ begins to sound, and Henri, still lying on the ground, reaches his hands up in the air and ‘waltzes’. It continues to play for about two minutes as Henri gets on his feet, invites Lucie to dance (she rejects him), and verbalizes how he feels:
The town hall is still burning. So you don't want to dance? [A pause.] I hate the music! … This music goes out in the window, it whirls over the corpses. Music, the sun, there's a picture for you. And the bodies are all black. We are so lost. We are forgotten by the whole world …Footnote 52
The jarring emotive and thematic incongruity between the music, the speech and the scene conjured up by the speech is not opaque. Ironically, this incongruity can also perhaps be read as the human soul, albeit battered, doggedly clinging to hope for a brighter future, a glimmer of hope woven into the tapestry of the kind of ‘total heroism’ that Zha and his team set out to dramatize through this production of the Sartre play.
The same ‘Blue Danube’ plays a few minutes into Act IV (105 minutes into the production). By this time, Jean has been released (by mistake), Sorbier has already jumped to his death, and Henri, Canoris and Lucie have each had their turn in the torture chamber. Pressured by Clochet, Landrieu, who has been mopping the blood-stained floor after they have tortured Canoris, finally decides to bring ‘the kid’ (François) down for interrogation. The report he gets – ‘They knocked [the kid] off during the night. He is now stone-dead’Footnote 53 – deals him a visible blow. As described by Sartre in his script, Landrieu, stunned, goes to the radio and turns it on. ‘The Blue Danube’ is on the air again. Accompanied by the melodic waltz, Landrieu confronts Petain's portrait (‘And us, we're left in the shit. You dirty bastard!’Footnote 54) and throws his glass of wine at the head of Vichy France. The waltz keeps playing until Landrieu orders his men to bring down all three of the remaining captives, Canoris, Henri and Lucie, to make them talk. Once again, the ambience and vista evoked by the seemly random music, ‘The Blue Danube’, present a sharp, jarringly ironic contrast to both the physical and the emotive realities in the torture chamber.
Mixing in with the mind-boggling, capricious interjection of music are the brutally realistic sound effects, bringing home to the audience in the little theatre the brutality of the extreme situation imagined in Sartre's Morts sans sépulture. From volleys of explosive gunfire in the added prologue and near the very end of the play to the metallic sound of doors opened and slammed shut that punctuate the dramatic action, heavy footsteps on concrete floor and metal stairway, and heartrending screams of pain from torture, brutally realistic sound effects are every bit a part of the extreme situation that tortures the captives, tests their mettle and interrogates the essence of their being.
Zha and his team have the Vichy captors wear leather shoes with metal heel plates, the hallway and stairway and the jail doors are installed with boundary microphones and high-sensitivity acoustic sensors in order to capture, magnify and create an acoustic facsimile of the terror of the two-tiered jail. According to Zhou Tao, music and sound designer for the production, the sound effects felt so frighteningly real for a performance in Taiwan that some audience members were in tears,Footnote 55 testimony to the raw emotive impact the performance has on the audience. The question remains, though, whether such a ‘cruel’ theatrical experience can actually lead to the kind of spiritual (re)awakening amongst the audiences that Zha hopes to effect.
The first sound of brutal torture occurs about twenty-seven minutes into the performance.Footnote 56 It is the cry of pain from Sorbier that comes from the torture chamber downstairs and pierces through the darkness. Dim light in the little theatre shows Sorbier twitching on a barred surface of red hot iron or charcoal – reminiscent of scenes of torture from ‘red classics’ (hongse jingdian) such as Hongyan (Red Crag/Red Rock, 1961).Footnote 57 The first torture scene realistically performed on the stage for the audience to see and feel its full emotive and psychological impact happens in Act II when Henri gets his chance to fight a battle of wills with his captors.Footnote 58 The sound (as well as the sight) of this torture scene, which lasts for ten minutes, especially when Henri, a tough-minded Resistance fighter, finally cannot bear the excruciating pain any longer (as his captors keep turning the sticks in the ropes binding his wrists) and screams his heart out, is unforgettable. Equally heartrending, if not more so, is the string of screams from Henri as he is being tortured more ferociously in the inner torture chamber. Visibly shaken, Landrieu frets about on the stage and turns on the radio in an attempt to drown out the sound of torture.Footnote 59 Soon after this scene, Sorbier is brought down to the torture chamber for a second time. The sound (as well as the sight) of the nail-pulling scene (near the end of Act II), the cry of pain, and afterwards a sobbing, all but broken Sorbier staggering on the stage, his eyes fixed on the bloody, mutilated finger with such anguish,Footnote 60 once heard and seen, are hard to forget.
Conclusion
Framed by the theme music of romantic love, Zha's 1997 production of Sartre's Morts sans sépulture (revived in 2005 and 2014) takes bold creative license, in the form of retooled dialogues; hard-edged stage design; moody, ironic interjection of music; brutal acoustic facsimile of torture; and so on, to reimagine the play for Chinese audiences and to achieve the artistic as well as socio-moral vision set out for the production. As shown in the discussion above, this production is neither an exuberant celebration of heroism as the term is conventionally understood or as the play was received in China in the 1980s, nor a parable-like play given to ‘philosophizing’ to explicate the core tenets of Sartre's existentialism. Rather, it is a full-scale theatrical presentation of ‘total heroism’: heroism that is flawed, falling far short of the kind of heroism idealized in the annals or mythologies of ‘red classics’ such as Hongyan, but it is heroism nonetheless (even if, as in the case of Sorbier, it falters and is not reasserted until the last moment of one's existence). It is an interrogation, in the fullest sense of the term, of the essence of being human, tested in the crucible of ferocious tortures. Through a full-scale theatrical presentation of ‘total heroism’, of a group of ‘flawed heroes’, Zha's production succeeds in shining a glimmer of light, of hope, of optimism at a time when much of the country, almost two decades into the twenty-first century, persists in its overzealous pursuit of material success and personal indulgence. It is a ‘cruel’ antidote much needed – more frequent perhaps than the long eight or nine years of interval between revival productions – to shock the numbed nerves of the body politic and inject some clarity into it.
