Rock Me Baby

Multi-media rock musical Amber catches China’s nihilistic rock n roll generation with its pants down.

By BRUCE VEDDER

AFTER making love, Xiao You is plagued with guilt. The pleasure she felt with Gao Yuan, had nothing to do with the heart of her dead boyfriend that has been transplanted into the rakish Gao Yuan. But when Xiao You ditches womanizer Gao on his birthday, he sleeps with local man-eater Yao Yaoyao. A drug binge afterwards leaves him comatose. His waster friends try in vain to revive him by taunting him with shocking catcalls. “…Idiot! Cat spray! Beggar, moldy piece of cake, piece of junk!" Not even a heavy metal score by his rocker friends wakes Gao from his coma – until love, in the form of Xiao, arrives.

The avant-garde husband and wife super-duo of Chinese theatre, director Meng Jinghui and playwright Liao Yimei, have another hit on their hands with Amber, follow-up to the hugely successful Rhinoceros in Love. Stylistically it has much in common with Rhinoceros, which premiered three years ago. Like his earlier work Amber is chock-full of international literary references and youth culture - the title, "Amber," which comes from a poem by Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, “expresses the feeling of time passing by, and the ceasing of the moment in flash,” Meng told journalists at the show’s premiere. There’s more of the rapid-fire storytelling mixed in with equally staccato slices of choreography. Meng has his characters moving and swaying, as if on board a ship, while ruminating out loud on the joys and pointlessness of materialism.

The storyline is as modern as the music. A slacker playboy – he appears to have made his money from dotcom business luck – Gao Yuan, played by Liu Ye, is saved by a heart transplant after the beloved fiancé of Xiao You (played by Yuan Quan), is killed. Doe-like Xiao You has little in common with the flamboyant pick-up artist Gao Yuan, save her fiancé's heart. Actress Yuan Quan is already a stage veteran but the heartthrob they all queued to see afterwards, Liu Ye, is a bona fide superstar of Chinese film. The pair, classmates at the Central Drama Academy in Beijing, spliced their lines with singing and dancing. Liu appears in every act of the two and a half hour piece.

The score during the show’s forays into multimedia has Chemical Brothers written all over it. Lots of postmodern snaps of random images all slammed together and moving along to a razor sharp techno beat. But while the live music for Rhinoceros in Love was provided by an acoustic guitarist strumming on one side of the stage, it seemed that for Amber a busload of the earnest rockers that hang around Beijing’s wilting rock bars had taken the stage. The soundtrack to Meng’s musical was distinctly rock, hard rock. Starring Liu Ye and Yuan Quan, Amber was billed as a “modern Chinese fable… a power drama of love and deceit.

Without knowing it perhaps, the large audiences that piled into the Poly Theater in Beijing were watching themselves. Yapping into fold-it phones and showing off brown-red hair streaming over halter tops and sprayed on denim, the young audience laughed at the familiarity of it all. Amber wraps social satire with poignant drama in a storyline that’s as international as it is refreshing. The character of Yao Yaoyao satirizes the "meinü zuojia-Beauty Queen Writers" on the mainland literary scene such as Shanghai writer Mian Mian's novel Candy and blogger Mu Zime’s lurid descriptions of sexual encounters. Gao Yuan and friends have a plot to cobble together The Screaming of the Sheets, a “filthy best-seller...[with] a sensational plot, wildly inappropriate diction, perverse sexuality, apathy, [and] licentiousness.” To cash in on the hunger for Chinese chick-lit, the book is ostensibly written by Yao Yaoyao (Sexy Bitch Goddess), a "liberated and shameless" twenty something with shocking red hair and a line in cheap sex. With her foulmouthed rail against the double standards that rule the game of love and sex in favor of men, Yao Yaoyao and The Screaming of the Sheets go from overnight sensation before the hoax is exposed.

In the finale a desperate Gao Yuan tells the lover who spurned him, "I never thought much of life, because I knew it could leave me at any time. I refused to be happy, because I knew that with happiness comes fear...[But now,] because of you, I'm afraid of dying." Quoting a love sonnet by Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, he tells Xiao You: "Already, you are mine/ Love, grief, labor must sleep now/ Night revolves on invisible wheels/ and joined to me you are/ as pure as sleeping amber.”

Amber is the closest you’ll get to a rock opera in China. The timeless tale it tells is the stuff of Bruce Springsteen ballads and U2 sermonizing. After its Beijing run the show will travel to Singapore for the city-state’s summer Arts Festival. Hopefully along the way they’ll add the English subtitles promised for the Beijing shows, because English-speaking audiences deserve to see and understand this production.