6 ★ FINANCIAL TIMES Thursday10 October 2019

ARTS

Janet Wong and

Xiang Yu in

‘Farewell My

Concubine’

West Kowloon Cultural

District Authority

Ken Smith

Because they initially took place only at

weekends, with any violence erupting

after sundown, Hong Kong’s current

wave of political protests have squarely

hit the arts world. Productions have

frequently found their venues shuttered

by mid-afternoon. A particularly mem-

orable night at the Chinese opera ended

early when tear gas aimed at nearby

protesters seeped into the theatre

(audience members were ushered to

the exits and given surgical masks

for protection).

Asthe protests have continued, can-

cellations have notably increased, par-

ticularly from mainland China. Both

Shanghai troupes scheduled for the new

Xiqu Centre’s Experimental Opera

Series pulled their productions, which

ultimately focused the spotlight on the

centre’s ownFarewellMyConcubine, orig-

inally developed in 2016 and making its

debut this month in the space for which

it was conceived.

As a genre, “experimental Chinese

opera” cuts a wide swath.Farewellnei-

ther explores new content, like the

Shanghai Kunqu Opera Troupe’s adap-

tation of Ionesco’s absurdist play

TheStairs(now postponed until Novem-

ber, date unannounced), nor employs

novel presentation, like the Shanghai

Yue Opera Group’s immersiveDestiny of

Rebirth(currently cancelled); rather,

it takes iconic repertory and imagines

it anew.

Key among the reinventions by Keith

Lai and Janet Wong — the production’s

principal performers and co-credited

playwrights, directors and musical

arrangers — is a shift from the story’s

Peking opera roots to Cantonese

opera, an alteration not just in dialect

but also in instrumental sonorities and

vocal techniques. Retaining most of its

original structure, the story now unfolds

as a 70-minute musical scroll where

archaic vocalism morphs into standard

set tunes, then into freshly composed

deconstructions where instrumental

snippets mingle with Wan San-hong’s

unpitched soundscape. The tragedy of

the King of Chu and his favourite concu-

bine become both the history of Canton-

ese opera and a vision of its potential.

The room on October 8 may have

been only two-thirds full, but the people

who braved a mass-transit shutdown

and traffic chaos resulting from a lack of

functional traffic lights were palpably

entranced. As the self-proclaimed 21st-

century home for traditional Chinese

opera, the Xiqu Centre has pointed at

least one way to the future.

ToOctober12,westkowloon.hk

Farewell that points a way to the future

O P E R A

Farewell My Concubine

West Kowloon Xiqu Centre, Hong Kong

aaaae

This week’s new film

releases reviewed by

Raphael Abraham and

Danny Leigh

B

ack in the days when fake

news was a funny idea, there

were the spoof current affairs

showsThe Day Todayand

Brass Eye, and Chris Morris

was their ringmaster. So assured was his

delivery of bulletins hat viewers wouldt

regularly swallow them whole or phone

the broadcaster in alarm, no matter how

bizarre the contents.

Moses Al Shabazz could use some of

that persuasive power. Instead this self-

styled black revolutionary and protago-

nist of Morris’s likeable new film

The Day Shall Come as amassed a fol-h

lowing of just three, and he faces evic-

tion from his pitiful family farm in

urban Miami. Plus he has some personal

issues. His talk of taking on Whitey and

bringing down “the cranes of gentrifica-

tion” is compromised somewhat by his

devotion to talking horses and belief

that avenging dinosaurs can be sum-

moned with a trumpet. In short, this

pacifist preacher, sweetly played by

Marchánt Davis, is about as dangerous

as the toy crossbow he wields, and the

tricorne hat he sports may as well be a

tinfoil one.

Still, it’s enough to excite the rabid

interest of US national security agencies

desperate to prove they are tackling ter-

rorism. If Moses is comically inept, the

Feds are no less farcical, concocting

cockamamie tales of insurrection and

trying to pin them on targets with the

help of a fake sheikh and a paedophile

they have groomed into an informant.

Their barbed exchanges drip withVeep-

style venom, though this acid wit is hard

to square with their crushing ineptitude.

If it all sounds preposterous, buckle

up. Morris’s filmmay veer wildly in tone

but he has gleaned much ofhis story

from actual FBI cases. The suspension of

disbelief this requires exceeds even that

demanded by his 2010 portrait of Brit-

ish jihadisFour Lions, and yet the new

movie is “based on a hundred true sto-

ries”. At the screening I went to, the

director came in clutching a clipboard

and elaborated on this in an intro that

waseven funnier and more shocking

than the film that followed.

The Day Shall Comeis not always as

sharp as it could be, but Morris may be

after something else. Amid the sheer

lunacy of it all, Moses emerges as a kind

of holy fool in a do-rag who casts a light

on the cruel world around him. He may

start off delusional in his belief that

there is a conspiracy against him but, by

the end, he’s not actually wrong.

A climactic stake-out in a doughnut

shop becomes profoundly touching, and

Davis can take most of the credit for this,

though he is ably supported by Anna

Kendrick’s steely but human Fed and

Danielle Brooks as Moses’s loving but

despairing wife.

Morris has already proved he can

do lacerating mockery. At a time

when we hear ad nauseam that current

events are “beyond satire”, making

people feel something may be the

greater achievement.

Netflix’sThe Laundromat is an

attempt to do for tax avoidance what

2015’sTheBigShort id for the subprimed

crisis. A Germanically accented Gary

Oldman and a silky-suave Antonio Ban-

deras (accent comes as standard) are

our dapper MCs for a carnivalesque ride

through the beginnings of the monetary

system, credit, taxes and their avoid-

ance. Later it will be revealed that they

are in fact Mossack and Fonseca, the

lawyers of Panama Papers fame.

On the other end of the wealth spec-

trum are Meryl Streep and James

Cromwell, pensioners who have care-

fully spent their lives building a nest-egg

but find only shells when a boating acci-

dent literally turns their lives upside

down. The impressively prolific Steven

Soderbergh keeps things loose and uses

much fourth-wall breaking and comic

digression to avoid a didactic tone, and

in a country-hopping series of vignettes

we see themechanisms of money laun-

dering exposed and satirised. But where

The Big Shortmanaged to do all this

while still summoning real emotional

impact and palpable anger,TheLaundro-

matseems scattershot by comparison.

It’s a short, sharp and diverting movie

but also a little self-satisfied and slight,

seeming better suited to the living room

or laptop thanthe big screen.RA

T

he film business is rarely

polite to writers, and so it

proves withThe King, in

which Shakespeare is

tweaked, polished and

brusquely script-doctored before wait-

ing to see if he is invited to the premiere.

Here, as directed by David Michôd, we

find the collectedKing Henry IV Parts I

and IIandHenry V errined into a singlet

narrative, with dialogue and character

arcs reworked by Michôd and co-writer

Joel Edgerton. Fifteenth-century Eng-

land is recreated — but the actual story

is only half-familiar, the Globe trans-

planted into the age ofGameofThrones.

The tone is broad and brooding. The

gloom arrives with the violence that

greets us on the battlefield of Holme-

don, a pale sun setting over a bloody

panorama of the dead and groaning.

The sombre Hotspur (Tom Glynn-

Terrorist with a toy crossbow

Timothée Chalamet in ‘The King’

The Day Shall Come

Chris Morris

AAAAE

The Laundromat

Steven Soderbergh

AAAEE

The King

David Michôd

AAAEE

Farming

Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje

AAAEE

Carney) surveys the carnage: “Scot-

land’s that way,” he tells a nearby casu-

alty, finishing him off with the weary

irritation of a man just remembering to

unload the dishwasher.

But a sense of pop — Shakespeare for

the groundlings — comes with the snap

of the language and a big-name cast

including Edgerton as Falstaff. Starrier

still is Timothée Chalamet as the callow

Prince Hal, much given to slo-mo

Eastcheap bacchanals. Celebrity aside,

Chalamet makes for intriguing casting.

If the actor provokes an uncertain

squint as to whether he is quite up to the

job, the same goes for his character,

whose need to prove himself is the hard

centre of the piece, war so often the end-

game of insecure boys.

In Hal’s case, the first doubter is the

fourth king Henry (Ben Mendelsohn).

But not for long, another editorial inter-

vention leaving all ofHenry IV s a merea

hors d’oeuvre forHenryV. As such, Men-

delsohn soon exits, Chalamet’s skinny

frame draped in ermine. And yet it is

lonely at the top, particularly for a

young king counselled by Machiavellian

Spad William Gascoigne, played by Sean

Harris. (If anyone, anywhere still hun-

gers for Brexit metaphors, grab a plate.)

The urgency with which the film

wants to get itself to Agincourt means

we see little of the estrangement

between Hal and Falstaff. While Edger-

ton enjoys the film’s most pointed yawn,

the real spoils go to the supporting Rob-

ert Pattinson; having made so many

indie movies viable in recent years, he

has earned the right to squeeze actorly

delight from his villainous Dauphin: “I

enjoy to speak English,” he sneers. “It is

simple and ugly.” It will not be the only

time a ghostly eyebrow rockets upward

somewhere in Stratford-upon-Avon.

In the English imagination, memories

of the 1970s long ago became distant

enough to soften their crueller edges.

The idyll is shattered inFarming, the

debut as writer and director from Brit-

ish actor Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje,

familiar from Hollywood projects

includingLostandThe Bourne Identity

but with this anguished autobiographi-

cal film revisiting the years in which,

like many children of Nigerian parents

in Britain, he was “farmed” into the care

of white foster parents. The same prac-

tice informed Shola Amoo’s recent

boldly lyricalThe Last Tree, set in the

early 2000s.

Here, set in an earlier decade, the

results are brutal. The location is the

overwhelmingly white Essex port-town

of Tilbury, where the teenage Enitan

(Damson Idris) goes unloved in a house

filled with fostered children, his spiral

into self-loathing so violent he tags

along with a local gang of racist skin-

heads. A less uncompromising film

might give the withdrawn Enitan a way

to articulate his trauma verbally, but it is

here and now that Akinnuoye-Agbaje

claims that voice. His film-making can

be raw — the pain streaked through it is

inarguable.DL

Above:

Marchánt Davis

in ‘The Day Shall

Come’. Left:

Meryl Streep

and Jeffrey

Wright in ‘The

Laundromat’

OCTOBER 10 2019 Section:Features Time: 9/10/2019- 18:10 User:david.cheal Page Name:ARTS LON, Part,Page,Edition:EUR, 6, 1