娱乐英语新闻:Choking to death

BEIJING, Aug.19 (Xinhuanet) -- A runaway hit on Beijing's stage highlights the plight of China's creative industry under the yoke of nonsensical censorship and the hopelessness of its struggle for more breathing room.

A comedy writer encounters a military officer who has just returned from the battleground, with one eye covered by a patch.

He needs the latter to give the green light to his latest project so that his troupe of stage actors can perform. But he is facing someone who has no love for the genre.

"People have no need for laughter during a time of war," argues the censor, who in the next seven days picks apart the script and pushes for hilarious changes.

Chinese actor Chen Daoming stars in Beijing People's Art Theater's drama Sorrows of Comedy.

This is the plot of Sorrows of Comedy, which recently completed its 18-day run at Beijing People's Art Theater. The obvious draw - no doubt about it - was Chen Daoming, whose first stage appearance after a superstar career on the screen was widely anticipated. If people came for the star, they stayed for the play, making it the biggest hit in the theater's history.

Actually, it is a Japanese work, set in World War II. But the translator moves the action to China, more specifically to Chongqing in 1941, between a Kuomintang official and the leader of a private performance group. The parallels with the current era are so striking it is hard for anyone to miss them.

The resonance was such that Feng Xiaogang, China's best-known filmmaker of comedy, lost control of himself after watching the stage production. In a post-show party with friends, he was so agitated the glass he was holding slipped from his hand and crashed into the glass table. His wife, actress Xu Fan and star of many of his blockbusters, broke down sobbing.

"We turned a comedy into a tragedy," he wrote later on his micro blog.

Anyone with even scant knowledge of the creative process of China's filmmaking can empathize with Feng. We have a censorship system so inane and so completely out of touch with reality that it is a miracle any good work survives relatively unscathed.

Take Ning Hao's No Man's Land, still in limbo after several years. One of the committee members who shot down the dark comedy revealed the reason: It had too many bad guys and the tone was too dark. This could be an apt description of Ning's early masterpieces, Crazy Stone and Crazy Racer as well, which probably barely survived the censor's kiss of death.

By the same token, film noir as a genre would not have existed if the same thou-shalt-not standards had been applied in Hollywood.

As a matter of fact, I did a little research and studied all Oscar winners in the Best Picture category since 1970. I found that, when put to the litmus test of China's moral arbiters, only three movies could have seen the light of day without substantial trimming or change - and they are Rocky, Dance with Wolves and Driving Miss Daisy. By extension, there would have been no Hollywood to speak of in the first place because an overwhelming number of its projects would be killed by someone 100 times more powerful than Will H. Hays, creator of the Hays Code, a self-regulatory code of ethics adopted in 1930 by the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America.

According to a recent Los Angeles Times article, "China's censorship rules discourage racy scenes and push screenwriters toward politically safer period pieces (which Western audiences may find difficult to follow) and romantic comedies. Instead of a global-cinema powerhouse, some worry China is at risk of turning into another Bollywood: healthy on its home continent but limp abroad."