Tim Bannerman's Theatre Chronicles: Part One - “Bells in the Cloud”
From a letter sent by Emperor Qianlong of China to King George III of England in 1793 following a request by the English to send an ambassador to the Chinese Court and engage in trade with the Chinese people.
“You, O King, live far away across many seas. Yet driven by the humble desire to share in the blessings of our culture, you have sent a delegation. You assure us that it is your veneration for our celestial ruling family that fills you with the desire to adopt our culture and yet the difference between our customs and moral laws and your own is so profound that, were your envoy even capable of absorbing the basic principles of our culture, our customs and traditions could never grow in your soil.”
“Ruling over the vast world, I have but one end in view, and it is this: to govern to perfection and to fulfil the duties of the state. Rare and costly objects are of no interest to me. I have no use for your country’s goods. Our Celestial Kingdom possesses all things in abundance and wants for nothing in its frontiers. Hence there is no need to bring in the wares of foreign barbarians to exchange for our own products. But since tea, silk and porcelain, products of the Celestial Kingdom, are absolute necessities for the peoples of Europe and for you yourself, the limited trade hitherto permitted in my province of Canton will continue.”
“Mindful of the distant loneliness of your island, separated from the world by desert wastes of sea, I pardon your understandable ignorance of the customs of the Celestial Kingdom.”
“Tremble at my orders and obey!”
A couple of hundred years or so later, in 2007, sitting in a restaurant with a potential client in the heart of Beijing, my ‘foreign barbarian’-ness was brought uncomfortably to mind when I realised that I was being watched. Unsuccessfully trying to camouflage himself behind a vase of chrysanthemums, my watcher was not only watching but close enough to hear our conversation.
From the moment I became aware of his presence, I noticed that every time I looked vaguely in his direction he looked away with the most innocent, choirboy look imaginable. In pure surveillance skills alone, I don’t think John Le Carre would have put him very far up the professional scale.
Although, in true Bond fashion, I could see him clearly in my client’s reflective sun-glasses, I thought it would be amusing to let him know I was on to him. So at a given point I turned and, looking straight at him, invited him with a smile to come and join us. Stricken, he hesitated for a moment and then hurriedly turned and fled, giving me one last accusing look as he left.
My companions looked embarrassed and I realised I had committed a faux pas. It was, it won’t surprise you, perfectly normal to be watched and, for all I know, followed and/or bugged day and night during a stay such as mine even if, in my innocence, I gave it scant regard. It also explained a consciousness in my client that we were not alone in our conversation that I had sensed from the start.
But it reminded me that I and almost certainly every other foreign visitor to China was, and quite probably still is, someone to be distrusted. Even more so in my case, given that I was there with the official purpose of working to find more harmonious ways in which the British “ex-pat” brigade might work alongside the Chinese on their home turf, no doubt involving the tricky business of lifting long-seated stones to find out what lay beneath.
It is no wonder that the British and the gwai lo (or “ghost person” aka people with white skins) as a whole are viewed with some scepticism when it comes to fair dealings and harmonious relations. In exchange for the Chinese providing us with the Emperor’s tea, silk and porcelain, having already generously furnished us with the arts of paper- and gun-powder-making, let alone the early use of the compass, we returned the compliment by hooking a vast part of their population on opium for an equally vast profit and then setting fire to and destroying some of their most precious national heritage. The ancient Imperial Summer Palace and the mystical temples – “Bells in the Cloud Pavilion”, “Glazed Longevity Pagoda” – to be found in The Fragrant Hills outside Beijing are but two examples of this wilful destruction during the 19th century.
Bound by various confidential agreements, I can’t go into the detail of who was involved in our work and why but I can tell you that the core tool of our approach to happier things was, bizarrely as it may sound, the age-old art of theatre in which the Chinese have a long, if highly stylised tradition.
The country itself wasn’t entirely alien territory as just the year before, my wife, Gill, and I had abandoned our three younger children to join our eldest, Leo, and his family, for a Chinese adventure, setting out from Shenzhen in Mainland China where they lived and worked at that time. I had also been to Hong Kong just over the water from there in the early ‘90s when Hong Kong was still under British jurisdiction.
We were living in France in those days when the UK consultancy with whom I was developing what some called “Industrial Theatre” (and I still struggle to define) asked me at very short notice if I would cover for them as a facilitator at a conference in Hong Kong. This turned out to be a gathering of 180 wild Australian women, allegedly travel agents, for Cathay Pacific.
With no clear brief, I was compelled to call on whatever wits I might be able to summon over three terrifying days in a world I knew only from Le Carre’s depiction with the wonderful George Smiley in “The Honourable Schoolboy”.
Having enjoyed from the cockpit – how things have changed! – the now long gone nail-biting skim inches above the tips of the tower blocks into the old Kai Tak Airport at the heart of the city centre, I found myself staring out over the Kowloon waterfront with only a mangy fish eagle for company. There we were, shooting the breeze, he with his tatty old wings just outside my umpteenth floor Shangri-La Hotel window, me a jet-lagged mess of confusion, wonder and naked fear, particularly so having just emerged from the shower.
As I shivered over my sealed fate in the goose-pimpling environment of my air-conditioned room, the fish eagle and I commiserated with each other on either side of the glass.
“What do you reckon, my friend?” I asked him. “What would you do in my place?”
After a short, wind-wobbled pause and an air of slight embarrassment, he replied:
“Grow feathers before catch death of cold.”
“No, I don’t mean that, thanks all the same. I mean the conference. Tomorrow. With 180 wild Australian women travel agents. For which I have not been briefed.
“It is not wise to be alone with 180 wild Australian women. And certainly not without brief.”
“You can say that again!” I said.
“It is not wise…”
“No,” I interjected impatiently. “I heard you the first time. Sorry to be rude but I know that all too well. But I can’t do a runner after they’ve flown me all the way out here at vast cost. I’ve got to bluff it out somehow, which isn’t easy with a bird’s nest soup of soggy twigs and broken shells for a brain, if you’ll pardon the metaphor.”
“Be quiet and listen,” said the bird.
“Sorry,” I said. So I waited. And listened.
“Elusive fragrance,” said the bird and swung closer to the glass. “Fragmented thoughts. Peony. Cherry blossom. Bamboo. Prepare before painting. Let finger select brush. Let brush choose when to touch paper to make mark it wishes. Release mind and picture will come. Snow melt. Path appear. One step at a time.”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s all very nice but the conference starts tomorrow lunchtime. I’ve only got tonight and tomorrow morning to get it all sorted. I can’t hang around waiting for the snow to melt and all that. I need the answer now.”
“Man who want roast duck to fly into mouth must wait long, long time,” said the bird.
“Yes, OK,” I said. “I get it. I just want a clue. An idea. Please?”
“Listen,” said the bird, fixing me with his baleful yellow eye. “High in pine tree, man sit. Pine tree on mountain peak. Man see far. Far as fish eagle.”
“Yes, all right,” I said. “So?”
“So, man, tree. Man, mountain. Man, bird. Below, far, far below, water fall. Fish fly up water. Water speak sound. Fish hear. Eagle catch fish. Man speak word.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
He gave me an old-fashioned look and replied in the finest Oxford tones, abandoning the mock-Confucian act he’d put on to play to my obvious, post-Imperialist preconceptions.
“All things are related,” he said, with a little smile, “unless you’d prefer: Only Connect?” And with a waggle of his tatty old wings, he was gone.
As, of course, they were and did, despite my worst fears. I survived, thanks partly to a life-time’s having to make it up as I went along – how else do you survive a traditional English boarding school? – but, most of all, to having a good story to kick things off tucked up my sleeve that I had performed many times by then as a “one man show” in front of widely diverse audiences.
“The True and Faithful Story of the Man Who Never Gave Orders” was originally written in French by my mentor and secular patron saint, Michel Fustier, fierce atheist and polymath that he was, as one of several catalysts for organisational and cultural change within major companies in France in the 1980’s.
On meeting up in Lyon in 1989, Michel and I quickly realised that, by combining our skills and experience – his as an industrial consultant with a belief in the power of theatre as a catalyst for change, mine as an actor, writer and director with little or no knowledge of industry whatsoever – we could take his existing work in this area and develop it in a variety of ways, both in France and the UK.
An added benefit was the fact that, like nearly all actors, I lived a hand-to-mouth existence, never knowing when, or whether, the next job would appear, and there were five other mouths to feed in my nest by the mid-to late-‘80s. Maybe, just maybe, this would be a means to contrive a steadier way through life’s vicissitudes, however self-inflicted they may have been to date.
So I translated this story and others, all based on Michel’s case studies as a consultant, and used these as cornerstones for the early stages of this original way to help organisations look at themselves and learn.
How? Well, no-one has described the art, impact and occasionally life-changing effectiveness of good theatre more brilliantly than Shakespeare. Take Hamlet’s speech to the visiting players who arrive serendipitously when he’s tearing his hair at how to get his step-father to confess to his father’s murder and almost suicidal at his own inability to achieve this. And then it comes to him.
“I have heard that guilty creatures, sitting at a play, have by the very cunning of the scene been struck so to the soul that presently they have proclaimed their malefactions. I’ll have these players play something like the murder of my father before mine uncle. I’ll observe his looks. I’ll tent him to the quick. If ‘a but blench, I know my course…. The play’s the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.”
And to make sure it works as intended, he gives the players a quick lesson in the art of good acting.
“Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature; for anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold as ‘twere the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image and the very age and body of the time its form and pressure”.
Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 2
Which is precisely what I and my colleagues have attempted to do over the last 40 years or so, wherever we might have found ourselves, and that has been some interesting places over the years, judging by my battered old passport of yore – including China.
End of Part One
