Cow-ture

It was pretty much an eye-opening weekend at the Theatre and Movies for me. A touch of Cow-ture, like what some friends of mine say in jest.

On Friday, I went to catch Ng Khee Jin's Feet Unbound at the Picturehouse. He's a Singaporean Chinese director based in Perth.



Shot documentary-style, Feet Unbound re-visits the much mythologised Long March by the Red Army in China between 1934 and 1937. In particular, Khee Jin focusses on the survivors from the Lady's Regiment within the Red Army through the eyes of a real-life Beijing journalist called Elly. Very few survivors have lived to tell the tale as it was one of the longest and largest mobilizations in human history. Barely 30,000 of the 200,000 soldiers who joined the Long March survived to the end.

Surrounded by Kuomintang troops of Generalissimo Chiang Kai Shek, the Red Army abandoned base camps in central China and split into two to retreat to Shaanxi in the north and Xinjang in the west. During the arduous and hasty retreat, the Western Front army was almost completely annihilated by a Muslim warlord, General Mu of Qinghai, an ally of the Kuomintang. But a handful survived, among them women.

Khee Jin managed to track down six of these survivors, visibly very tough old ladies, some of them in their eighties and nineties, to listen to their version of events. His documentary traces the tragic fate of these old women in a military fiasco rarely recounted in Chinese history.

I loved it. Not only for the stunning vistas of the Tibetan Plateau and rugged beauty of Sichuan province where most of the movie was shot. But also because the film made me delve deeper into Communism in China and appreciate why China would never give up its claim on Kuomintang- ruled Taiwan. More so when you consider what early Communist Party pioneers like Mao Zedong had to go through to secure Socialist glory for the 'Capitalist-infested' Motherland.



And then it was off to the theatre yesterday. To catch TNT Theatre Britain's interpretation of Hamlet.



TNT's version is perhaps a little unique because it takes inspiration from the 1st Quato, an early edition of the Master's works, and so is significantly much shorter (about 2.5 hours). The folio edition of Hamlet can run on stage for 4-5 hours!

Some scholastic quarters believe that the 1st Quato was what Shakespeare had in mind for the stage. And perhaps the only version he ever saw physically being acted out.

Overall a very, very sterling performance from the cast and crew of the TNT. Hamlet was not over-interpreted to the point of it becoming ridiculous. In fact, for Shakespeare, I think the Brit actors still do it best. Its like, well, in their gene pool to be able to rattle off in the typical Shakespearean way.