Based on a number of original dramatic works by Cao Yu (1910-1996), The Sun Is Not For Us will be staged at the Shanghai Drama Art Center from November 6 to 8. Drawing on such acclaimed works as Thunderstorm (1934), Sunrise (1936), The Wilderness (1937) and The Metamorphosis (1940), the play will feature non-Chinese actors who are all young theater majors from the University of Leeds.

The play is being directed by the students' teacher, David Jiang (Jiang Weiguo), a Chinese-born theater professor and director who has been actively involved in both Western and Chinese theater circles for more than 45 years. According to Jiang, he and his students devised the play to mark the anniversary of Cao's 100th birth anniversary in 2010. "At that time in Leeds, I found that almost none of my colleagues had even heard of him so I decided to do something to bring this great Chinese playwright to the attention of Westerners," Jiang told the Global Times.

Doctoral degree

Jiang graduated from the acting department of the Shanghai Theater Academy way back in 1964 and in the four years after that he worked as an actor and director for a traditional Huangmei Opera company in Anhui Province. Since then, as an actor, playwright and theater director, Jiang has worked and taught in New York, Leeds, Taipei, Hong Kong and Shanghai. He also completed a doctoral degree on theater in the UK in 1997. Today, the 70-year-old is the dean of the school of drama at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts and is also a guest professor of the Shanghai Theater Academy, the Central Academy of Drama, the University of Leeds and Columbia University. As well as his teaching work, he has also directed many Western theater works with Chinese actors, and also worked with Western actors performing Chinese plays. Among his most famous productions are Man from Wuling (Wuling Ren by Zhang Xiaofeng, in the US, 1999), Family (Jia by Ba Jin, in Hong Kong, 2002) and The Peach Blossom Fan (Taohua Shan by Kong Shangren, in the UK, 2010).

While in Shanghai rehearsing The Sun Is Not For Us, The Global Times was given an exclusive interview with Jiang.

GT: With more than 20 years of cross-cultural projects, what is the philosophy behind your teaching and directing work?

Jiang: For the past 23 years, I have actually been doing one job, that is, acting as a bridge between Chinese and Western theater circles in order to enhance mutual understanding. There still exists misunderstandings between the two, although the situation is now improving because cultural exchanges are becoming more commonplace.

GT: What are the misunderstandings you refer to?

Jiang: Many Chinese people believe that Western theater automatically equates to avant-garde theater. They believe theater in the West is always associated with avant-garde external forms, such as physical plays without dialogue, experimental performances and very simple stage settings.

In fact, Western theater encompasses huge variety. They have costly and lavish musicals, and also small productions featuring only a couple of actors. Interpretations of Shakespeare's plays can be vastly different. However, no matter what the external form of the productions is, there is always one essential principle and that is the attention paid to the actors' performances. Even if the form being used appears exaggerated, the acting always strives to be realistic.

For instance, I watched a play in the UK in which four actors sat around a table. The opposing pairs were each engaged in a two-man dialogue while seemingly unaware of the words of the other pair at the table. It was as if they were in the same place but at two different times. But many Chinese theater projects concentrate on avant-garde forms, but ignore the performance of the actor.

From a Western point of view, there is generally very little knowledge about Chinese plays. Mention Chinese theater and most Westerners will think of Peking Opera, but little else. They don't know that besides the traditional Chinese operas, there are also many contemporary Chinese plays. 

GT: In your opinion, how does theater education differ between China and the West?

Jiang: Theater education in China pays more attention to basic skills training, and students are always taught in a very exact way what kind of performance they should give. In the West, what teachers always do is to encourage the performance potential in an actor and to inspire them to draw that potential out of themselves. They seldom tell an actor what he or she should do, but ask how they might behave if they encountered a similar situation in their own life to the one facing their character. Of course, sufficient basic skill training is still necessary as well.