The spacious rehearsal hall has a wire bed in the middle. Liu Ye was right next to the bed, sometimes whispering, sometimes running manically beside the cramped bed. He plays the role of Jean Valjean, a convict who spent 19 years in prison just for stealing a piece of bread.
"Jean Valjean strode into the counter. He opened the cabinet and opened the drawer, and saw the silverware and plates inside. He put those things into his backpack, and regardless of the noise he made, he strode across the restaurant ." Liu Ye told the story of Jean Valjean at a very fast speed. Sometimes he was Jean Valjean himself, and sometimes he was an onlooker narrator. As many as eight pages of lines, dense, coherent, and without pauses, are the dramatic tension presented at the beginning of the play "Les Misérables" and are also the ultimate test for actors.
From January 26th to 28th, the Chinese version of the play "Les Misérables" will officially premiere at the Poly Theater in Beijing, and will then kick off its national tour.
Liu Ye also serves as the starring and producer of the drama, while French wife Anna serves as the producer. At Anna's invitation, Jean Bellolini, director of the French National People's Theater and famous theater director, served as director, making this play highly anticipated. Jean Bellolini was both an opera and theater director and a composer, and he had brought to the stage many of the most difficult-to-adapt masterpieces, from Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov to The Brothers Karamazov Rust's "In Search of Lost Time" gives the classic many modern implications.
's drama "Les Misérables" opened in Beijing last July and all three shows were sold out.
A personal spiritual epic in the great era
"Les Misérables" is a million-word masterpiece that Hugo conceived 40 years ago and completed in his later years. The writer calls himself "a religious work."
Jean Bellolini said that he read "Les Misérables" as early as his childhood, and it was also the first long novel with many ups and downs that he came into contact with.
"After the publication of 'Les Misérables', various versions of stage plays began to be produced on stages around the world." Jean Bellolini said that in 1863, the second year after the publication of the novel, Hugo's son Charles Hugo adapted the novel into a two-act play, which premiered in Brussels and was subsequently performed in Bordeaux, Paris and other places.
In 1899, the revival of "Les Misérables" premiered in Paris. Paul Morris revised the entire script and was listed as a co-author. The Chinese version of the "Les Misérables" script produced by Yanghua Drama this time was translated based on the Paris re-typesetting version.
"Les Misérables" is known as "an encyclopedia of human suffering and a spiritual epic of humanity's kindness." The original novel has been translated into 17 languages and has been remade into countless movies and stage plays. The musical "Les Misérables", which began in 1980, has become popular all over the world and has been translated into 22 languages and performed around the world.
"'Les Misérables' is borderless and transcends the times. It has both the beauty of language in literary works and the beauty of human truth and goodness shown in the core of thought." The director admitted frankly that he did not reconstruct the dialogue of the characters, but It is a splicing of different fragments from the original work, so all the lines in the play come from Hugo's original text.
In "Les Misérables" Hugo described remote small towns and coastal emerging industrial towns, and described the whole picture of Paris from a reporter's perspective in detail, from prisons, slums, streets to the invisible underground world, from rude and kind-hearted people. It writes about street children, vicious criminal gangs, and menial working convicts. It also writes about the climax of the Revolution in 1793 to the Parisian people's uprising in 1832, forming a vicissitudes of 19th-century Paris Ukiyoe.
Because of his status as a composer, Jean Bellolini's dramatic characteristics are often inseparable from music. When selecting actors, he also selected actors from different art industries, including drama actors, Kunqu opera, cross talk, Suzhou Pingtan and other different categories.
He rarely speaks when directing. Instead, he sits in front of the piano and improvises, bringing the actors into a certain situation and finding their inner rhythm and emotions. During the rehearsal process, he rehearsed while composing, and many pieces of music were born.He imagined that every character in the play should have his own music, and the audience would still carry the music of the characters in the play with them when they walked out of the theater.
Among Chinese actors, Jean Bellolini gains energy every day. For him, acting is not about "acting", but "the pursuit of the integration of the actor himself and the role. When we don't know when we are actors, When it is a character, this is the most perfect moment we are looking for."
He hopes that actors can create a sense of integration with the character, and this point has shown many moments in Liu Ye that moved him, "When an actor Everyone can feel deeply moved by integrating their own life experiences into the characters." Liu Ye believes that the director gave the drama a strong French drama style.
Shaping the acceptance of Jean Valjean by Chinese audiences
"The protagonist of "Les Misérables" is of course Jean Valjean. We need Liu Ye to portray Jean Valjean. Through this character, a person's heart can be faithfully conveyed to everyone. "Jean Bellolini said frankly that "Les Misérables" describes the epic of France's difficult times, and it is also Jean Valjean's personal spiritual epic.
"I have always wanted to do something special after I turned 40. Over the years, I have been engaged in Sino-French cultural exchanges. When I heard that Yanghua was going to rehearse "Les Misérables", I immediately felt that this was what I wanted to do. "Liu Ye said that he had read the comic book "Les Miserables" when he was eight or nine years old. When he was in college, he also dreamed of playing the role of Jean Valjean. Unexpectedly, after the age of 40, he would appear on the stage of a drama after a long absence of 13 years. Make your wish come true.
"Being able to portray a character like Jean Valjean is a career pride for any actor." Liu Ye said that after accepting this play, he turned down job offers for nearly half a year and will tour the country in 2024 The pace means that he will spend a year focusing on the drama stage. The most difficult thing is that this role has a heavy role and a huge amount of lines. In the opening chapter alone, Liu Ye had to memorize eight pages of dialogue. Liu Ye laughed and said that his greatest talent as an actor is that he can recite lines very quickly. But Anna revealed that Liu Ye got up at 5 a.m. every morning to memorize lyrics, and the couple worked together in the rehearsal venue to discuss roles, which Liu Ye regarded as "another honeymoon period."
Memorizing lines is still the most basic requirement. How to narrate the rhythm of these dialogues on the stage and perform a relaxed and credible state is Liu Ye's performance homework. "The biggest problem is that you have to perform charmingly in eight pages, otherwise the audience doesn't want to look at you, what should you do? You have to make the audience look at you all the time."
In the past, Liu Ye studied Stanislavsky acting. The system requires the release of nature and self-expression on the stage. It is not a performance, but a life on the stage. But this time, director Jean Bellolini's directing style is Brecht's system, which requires the use of "defamiliarization effect" and "alienation method". When facing the audience, the actors sometimes blend into the characters and sometimes are higher than the characters. Sometimes control the role. This kind of dramatic performance of being at a distance and jumping in and out allows Liu Ye to gallop on the stage with ease.
There are many inner monologues of characters in "Les Misérables". Jean Valjean was moved by Bishop Bian Furu and changed from evil to good. After Javert let Jean Valjean go, he meditated and introspected by the Seine. These are all scenes that touch people's hearts.
In order to let the actors present their best performance, the director used many different methods. He would ask Liu Ye to act like a gust of wind was blowing on his face. He would also push the music to the loudest level, requiring the actors to use the loudest voice and the fullest emotion to overwhelm the music to achieve a dramatic effect.
Liu Ye said that "Les Miserables" is a work that begins with suffering and ends with redemption. What it wants to convey is actually very warm. "For Jean Valjean, this is a work about self-salvation, forgiveness, and love." Story. It teaches people to be kind, and what it tells over and over again is love."
"I am a drama actor, and drama has special meaning to me."Liu Ye said that in July last year, he officially joined the group and started the first stage of rehearsals. He instantly regained the passion for performing in school dramas more than 20 years ago. He hopes that he can transcend many classic versions of "Les Miserables" and "create a A Jean Valjean acceptable to Chinese audiences."
