Abstract
Identity mobility has been a popular theme in the translated theatre of Hong Kong since the 1980s. In addition to Twelfth Night, which we have discussed in Chap. 6, titles such as A Servant of Two Masters, The Importance of Being Earnest, Noises Off, Spring Fever Hotel, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Run for Your Wife, A Flea in Her Ear, Room Service, An Absolute Turkey and Whose Wife Is It Anyway? were frequently staged and widely loved by the local audience. Among these plays, two titles particularly caught the imagination of the Hong Kong audience, namely, Ray Cooney and John Chapman’s Move Over, Mrs. Markham! and George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion.
All quotations from Move Over, Mrs. Markham! come from Ray Cooney and John Chapman’s Move Over, Mrs. Markham! (London: Warner Chappell Plays Ltd, 1995). All quotations from Szeto Wai-kin’s Naughty Couple come from a photocopy of the 1993 handwritten performance script (unpublished). All quotations from Szeto Wai-kin’s Naughty Couple come from a scanned copy of the 1993 typewritten performance script (unpublished). All quotations from Pygmalion come from George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion and Three Other Plays (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2004). All quotations from Rupert Chan’s Lovely Is This Noble Lady come from a photocopy of the 1997 handwritten performance script (unpublished). This writer owes her gratitude to Mr. Szeto, Mr. Chan and Mr. Dominic Cheung for providing the scripts. All back-translations from Chinese to English are done by this writer, unless otherwise stated.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
The writer was not able to secure a copy of the printed screenplay of Naughty Couple, the adaptation of Ray Cooney and John Chapman’s Move Over, Mrs. Markham! Upon request, Szeto Wai-kin, writer of both the stage script and the screenplay, promised to retrieve the screenplay but was unable to do so. It was handwritten back then and there was no electronic copy made as back-up. He said he could not get hold of the film company and believed the film company was unlikely to have filed all screenplays to date. Dominic Cheung, director of the namesake stage production, provided a typewritten copy, courtesy of a student at the Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts, Octavian Chan 陳焯威. The writer would like to extend gratitude to Szeto, Cheung and Chen for their kind efforts.
The analysis of Naughty Couple is based on Chan’s typewritten version. The writer took pains to check the lines and stage directions against the film and found very few significant differences. In the stage production, the Markham mansion is depicted as a one-floor apartment in Shau Kei Wan, Hong Kong. The flat dimension would probably entail a lower cost in backdrop production. In the film version, the Markham mansion became a two-storey house in Sai Kung, Hong Kong. The running and panting of the actors up and down the staircase generated much physical humour. The only difference is when Henry’s one-night-stand partner sings him a short refrain from a flirty song over the phone. In the stage production, the song chosen was George Lam’s 林子祥 Huose shengxiang 活色生香 (Temptations). The refrain was “熱力是沒法擋 , 紅唇在為你張” (Reli shi meifa dang, hongcun zai wei ni zhang; lit. trans.: The heat is irresistible; her red lips are wide open for you). In the film version, the song is changed to Veronica Yip’s 葉玉卿 Dangbuzhu de fengqing 擋不住的風情 (Irresistible sensations). The refrain is “來吧 , 我甚麼都應承 : 來吧 ! 我甚麼都聽命” (Laiba, wo shenme dou yingcheng; laiba, wo shenme dou tingming; lit. trans.: Come on, I will promise you everything. Come on, I will obey your every order). Veronica Yip was a sex icon in the territory at the time of the film production. The adoption of Yip’s song is more appropriate in this context than Lam’s song, as the former is consistent with the image of the phone operator, who claims she and Yip look alike. This also arouses more fantasy as the audience could allude to a real-life celebrity and the dramatic effect would be enhanced.
- 2.
The binary opposition between “light-hearted”, “comic” and “popular” theatre and “serious”, “highbrow” theatre is problematic, but I use it in this chapter based on the way in which the theatre practitioners themselves distinguish the types of plays staged in the territory. Here Eagleton’s (2000) distinction between the universally relevant and appealing culture, which often makes up part of the canon, and the numerous “blatantly particular” cultures, which are often locally rooted and do not travel so well, is very helpful. When Hong Kong theatre practitioners talk about “serious” or “highbrow” theatre, they are usually referring to internationally renowned plays which are performed by professional theatre companies all over the world, i.e., cultures. When they talk about light hearted dialect comedies, they are referring to plays which could not successfully be performed outside the territory, i.e., local culture.
- 3.
All quotations of Szeto Wai-kin are taken from the author’s interview with him in Hong Kong on 14 December 2009, unless otherwise specified. See Szeto (2009).
- 4.
The names of the characters have been changed (the two sets of names and the meanings of the Chinese names are given in Table 8.1). For the sake of clarity, in the analysis in this section, the names in Szeto’s version will be used.
- 5.
Judith Butler has been enormously influential in arguing that identity is the effect of performance and not vice versa. Gender is, she has written, “a construction that conceals its genesis, the tacit collective agreement to perform, produce, and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fictions is obscured by the credibility of those productions” (1990: 140). Her main objective is to explore the materiality of sex.
- 6.
The Chinese film title Yaotiao shunü 窈窕淑女 is a phrase borrowed from the poem “Guanzui” 關雎 (“Fair, Fair, Cry the Ospreys”) from Shijing 詩經 (Book of Songs). The actual line is “窈窕淑女 , 君子好逑” (“Yaotiao shunu, junzi hao qiu”; “Lovely is this noble lady, fit bride for our lord”) (Arthur Waley’s translation; Minford and Lau 2000: 82).
References
Aaltonen, Sirkku. 2000. Time-sharing on stage: Drama translation in theatre and society. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Amkpa, Awam. 1999. Drama and the languages of postcolonial desire: Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion”. Irish University Review 29(2): 294–304.
Anonymous. 2006. Zhou Runfa Xianggang dianying piaofang yi lan 周潤發香港電影票房一覽 [Box office revenues of Hong Kong films by Chou Yun-fat]. http://ido.thethirdmedia.com/turl=http%3a//ido.3mt.com.cn/article/200604/show336076c24p1.xxxx&rurl=&title=%u5468%u6DA6%u53D1%u9999%u6E2F%u7535%u5F71%u7968%u623F%u4E00%--%20ido.3mt.com.cn. Posted on 15 April 2006. Accessed 21 October 2008.
Bammer, Angelika (ed.). 1994. Introduction. In Displacements: Cultural identities in question, xi–xx. Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Begelman, David. 2010. Move Over, Mrs. Markham is Frenzied Farce in Newtown. Newstimes.com. Published online 12 May 2010. http://www.newstimes.com/local/article/Move-Over-Mrs-Markham-is-frenzied-in-484617. Preview. Accessed 25 June 2010.
Blunder, Andy. 2008. Commodity. Encyclopedia of Marxism. http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/c/o.htm#commodity. Accessed 9 May 2011.
Booth, Michael R. 1980. Prefaces to English nineteenth-century theatre. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge.
Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of “Sex”. New York: Routledge.
Chan, Rupert 陳鈞潤. 1997. Interview by Sze-wai Shing 盛思維. Hong Kong, August 1997. In Xianggang huaju fangtanlu 香港話劇訪談錄 [Collection of interviews with theatre practitioners in Hong Kong], ed. Gilbert C. F. Fong, 145–153. Hong Kong: Hong Kong Theatre Works, The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Chan, Rupert 陳鈞潤. 2009. Interview by author. Hong Kong, 12 December 2009.
Cheung, Dominic 張可堅. 2010. Email correspondence with author, May 2010.
Chisholm, Kenneth. 2005. Move over Mrs. Markham. Official website of Theatre in London. Published online 24 October 2005. http://theatreinlondon.ca/2005/10/move-over/mrs-markham. Accessed 25 June 2010.
Cooney, Ray, and John Chapman. 1995. Move over Mrs. Markham. London: Warner Chappell Plays Ltd.
Derrida, Jacques. 1982. The ends of man. In Margins of philosophy, 109–136. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Eagleton, Terry. 2000. The idea of culture. Oxford/Malden: Blackwell.
Freud, Sigmund. 1989. On dreams. In The Freud reader, ed. Peter Gay, 142–172. New York: W. W. Norton.
Gay, Ignacio Ramos. 2008. Joe Orton and the subversion of the French Farcical tradition. Babel-Afial 17: 115–130.
Goffman, Erving. 1990. The presentation of self in everyday life. Repr., London: Penguin.
HKMDB (Hong Kong Movie Data Base) 香港影庫. n.d. Naughty Couple 撞板風流 (Zhuangban fengliu). http://hkmdb.com/db/movies/view.mhtml?id=7905&display_set=big5. Accessed 11 June 2010.
Lawrence, Floyd. 2010. Move Over, Mrs. Markham spreads the Marmalade thick. Theatre previews, reviews, GoErie.com. Published online 20 May 2010. http://www.goerie.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100520/ENTERTAINMENT0201/305199889. Accessed 9 May 2011.
Minford, John, and Joseph S.M. Lau (eds.). 2000. Classical Chinese literature: An anthology of translations. Volume I: From antiquity to the Tang dynasty. New York/Hong Kong: Columbia University Press/The Chinese University Press.
Piller, Ingrid. 2002. Passing for a native speaker: Identity and success in second language learning. Journal of sociolinguistics 6(2): 179–206.
Rampton, Ben. 1999. Styling the other: Introduction to themed issue. Journal of sociolinguistics 6(4): 428–442.
Rampton, Ben. 2000. Crossing. Journal of linguistic anthropology 9(1–2): 54–56.
Robyns, Clem. 1994. Translation and discursive identity. Poetics Today 15(3): 405–428. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1773316. Accessed 26 April 2011.
Shaw, Bernard. 2004. Pygmalion and three other plays. New York: Barnes & Noble.
Szeto, Wai-kin 司徒偉健. 1993. Naughty couple. Cantonese translation of Ray Cooney and John Chapman’s More Over, Mrs. Markham!.Unpublished play script.
Szeto, Wai-kin 司徒偉健. 2009. Interview by author, Hong Kong, 14 December 2009.
Yun, Josephine. 2003. Move over, Mrs. Markham. Theater, Arts Section, Baltimore City Paper, 9 October 2003. http://www.citypaper.com/arts/story.asp?id=4217. Accessed 9 May 2011.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2015 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Chan, S.Ky. (2015). Identity and Mobility: Move Over, Mrs. Markham! and Pygmalion . In: Identity and Theatre Translation in Hong Kong. New Frontiers in Translation Studies. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-45541-8_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-45541-8_8
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-662-45540-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-662-45541-8
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawSocial Sciences (R0)