"Dangdangdang" The father played the piano disorderly, jumping out of different scales, and the daughter's hurried footsteps interrupted the "solo concert". André, a retired engineer, lives alone in a spacious, tastefully decorated apartment in Paris, where his daughter, Anna, visits him regularly, and his daily interactions are fraught with conflicts. The drama "Father" (Chinese version) produced by the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Center will be performed at the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Center until August 11, and will be staged at the National Center for the Performing Arts from August 15 to 18.
The drama "Father" tells the story of an old man with Alzheimer's disease, who constantly falls into the whirlpool of time and space where memory and reality are intertwined in the process of getting along with his daughter. By alternating the perspective of an Alzheimer's patient and the perspective of the patient's family, the work creates a sense of confusion with a suspenseful effect, and as the unreasonable plot progresses, it allows the audience to intuitively see that when a person falls into Alzheimer's disease, the passage of time and memory seems to become a countdown to his life.
In 2014, the screenplay for "The Father" won the Molière Drama Prize, the France heavyweight drama award, for Best Screenplay. Screenwriter Florian · Zeller skillfully uses "seeing is believing" to tell the story from the perspective of someone who cannot distinguish between reality and delusion, and his novel narrative approach has won him numerous accolades.
The role of Andre, the "father" in the play, is played by the famous actor Jin Shijie, and he said that the biggest dramatic tension of this script is that "this is a small family meeting that can be solved, but some people can never cross that level, and if they cross it, he will blame himself for the rest of his life." This role also brought a huge challenge to Jin Shijie, he admitted: "Many of Andre's lines are very similar, and I often step on the air, which has hardly happened in my previous stage play experience." In the face of "Father", Jin Shijie did not dare to underestimate the enemy, as his first stage work in cooperation with the mainland theater troupe of the motherland, he said that the professionalism of the words made him feel at ease when he stepped out of his comfort zone.
Rather than crying bitterly, this work allows more people to detach themselves from reality with Andre and get into trouble with his troubled daughter Anna. Tian Shui, a national first-class actor and actor from the Shanghai Dramatic Art Center, was also heartbroken when he played Anna: "My mother also suffers from Alzheimer's disease, and the appearance of Andre and Anna in rehearsals always overlaps with the appearance of myself and my mother. So, Tian Shui opened himself over and over again, and those memories that he couldn't bear to read after the departure of his loved ones were packed into Anna's body again and again, added and subtracted over and over again, so that the performance was infinitely closer to the creator's accuracy.
In the 125 minutes of "Father", the narrative logic is chaotic but true. The stage is composed of two sides, as the plot progresses, from an ordinary living room to a nursing home with only one bed, each time the stage rotates props will be moved one or two until they disappear completely, and towards the end of the play, André keeps shuttling through the eight doors, no matter which one is opened, he sees the living room, he is trapped in it, facing the details of life and disappearing like his memory.
As director Jiang Weiguo said: "This is a tragicomedy that will make the audience feel 'deceived', the clever and exquisite script structure is advanced layer by layer, the actors' interesting interpretation and the sad plot are intertwined, making people explore with curiosity which scenes are in the protagonist's fantasy and which ones are real, and the blurring of boundaries makes people unconsciously fall in." ”