Fringe Festival Imports Italy, Serves “Toxic” Symbolism

Hong Kong – Marcovaldo was a fictional Italian character. He became unmistakably Cantonese at this year’s City Festival. Forget the Italian protagonist’s name, the actor’s Korean accent, or the mostly English-language script. Marcovaldo’s story should resonate with everyone living in the Pearl River Delta region.

Kim Gun as Marcovaldo

Theatre du Pif brought the character home to China with Marcovaldo. The story of a poor man in a big city — a migrant labourer of rural origins — was inspired by Italo Calvino’s Marcovaldo ovvero Le Stagioni in Città, published in 1963.

The cast of Bonni Chan, Sean Curran and Kim Gun transformed Calvino’s collection of 20 short stories into ten discombobulating scenes. They held seven performances during the last two weeks of January.

Hong Kong’s annual Fringe Festival explores a different international city every year. This year it was Guangzhou (formerly Canton). Hong Kong and Guangzhou are the two epicentres of a shared cultural-linguistic heritage.

The Hong Kong festival paid homage to the city, the historic heart of Cantonese culture.

At a superficial level, an Italian-based story seemed peculiar for an arts event focusing on a city in southern China.  Theatre du Pif rendered the contention to be moot. The set defied geographic characterisation.

No city was named. Amorphous urban congestion rose from a blank floor. A simple cabin stood against a divided backdrop of skyscrapers and forest. The only allusion to Italy was the protagonist’s name.

Spectators entered the Fringe Club’s theatre to find artificial smog encircling a simple stage. Lights dimmed. Night crept indoors. Electronic melodies pulsed, and Bonni Chan danced in the shadows. She traced the urban skyline with flashing LED lights in her hands.

Morning broke. Rattling crosswalk signals ushered invisible crowds across busy intersections. Cacophonous alarm bells, traffic honking and babies crying melted into the soundtrack. Enter Marcovaldo, played by Korean actor Kim Gun.

Theatre du Pif parodied our urban confinement using expressive gesture, dance, music and humour. “Look, a mushroom!” Sean Curran shouted in exaggerated Cantonese.  He then jumped back to English, regaining his Scottish brogue. He watched Marcovaldo discover life sprouting from the dead sidewalk.  Any sense of whimsy was deceptive, as the men learned upon eating the fungus. The mushrooms were poisonous.

Curran’s antics alternated between farcical and tragic. He provided comedic relief throughout the performance: He was Marcovaldo’s nagging wife. He was a renegade poisonous bunny. His eyes lit up. His face contorted in rage.

The dramatic presentation changed Calvino’s straight-faced narrative. But the cast’s dedicated acting, flailing dances, zany dream sequences and imaginary props captured something fundamental in Calvino’s form of Magical Realism — a necessary suspension of disbelief.

Scenes reached anti-climax, then mutated abruptly.  The truncated stories created the surreal sensation of a lucid dream. Actors constantly switched to dramatically different roles.

Marcovaldo found a rabbit and his children made it a pet. His wife wanted to skin it for dinner. Chan shouted into a loudspeaker, as if the police: “The rabbit is poisonous!” It had escaped from a drug testing facility. Curran held his hands on his head in place of bunny ears. The tall Scottish rabbit hopped away. He morphed into another character.

Daily life consumed Marcovaldo. He was dissatisfied with his job, disconnected from the environment, yearning for fulfillment. Every magical occurrence turned to disappointment. Every dream, a nightmare.

Marcovaldo journeyed into the rural countryside to find prime salmon fishing waters. He caught a folded newspaper swimming through the air. The salmon’s flesh was a strange blue. A paint factory was dumping waste dye into the river.

Midway through the performance, Chan’s character served tea and carrot cake to Marcovaldo. She turned to the audience and offered the remaining pieces. The cake appeared unnatural, green cubes in the dimly lit theatre. Toxic green.

Some ate. Some did not. Some left the performance with the realisation that their lives mirrored the surreal existence of a fictional Italian character. Forget the madcap wackiness in Marcovaldo. The cake is a symbol we must all digest. Marcovaldo walks among us in the crowded, smoggy streets.  In Guangzhou.  In Hong Kong.

Theatre du Pif has garnered international acclaim for cross-cultural and bilingual productions. Chan and Curran founded the company in a Welsh castle in 1992. Their first performance occurred at a festival in Germany. Three years later, they moved via Scotland to Hong Kong.

Their appearance at the Fringe Festival reminded us how stage and life are reflections; story is the mirror. Northern Italy became southern China. National and ethnic boundaries dissolved in universality.

Calvino once wrote: “Travelling, you realize that differences are lost: Each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents.”