20THE CIRCLE OF CHALK

Cover of London theater program for The Circle of Chalk, 1929 (Courtesy of Masheter Archive / Alamy Stock Photo)

IT IS A CHINESE TALE as old as the Bible: A beautiful girl named Hai-tang is sold to a brothel by her destitute family. Ma, a childless, married rich man, takes her home as his concubine. After she bears him a son, the first wife becomes jealous. She accuses Hai-tang of adultery and then poisons Ma. She blames Hai-tang for the murder and claims the baby as her own so that she can usurp all the wealth. Hai-tang is arrested and tortured into making a false confession. On the eve of her execution, she is rescued by a wise magistrate who sets up an ingenious ruse. He places the baby inside a circle of chalk and asks the two women to pull the child as hard as they can, in a winner-take-all match. Afraid to hurt her own baby, Hai-tang willingly gives up, and the shrewd magistrate instantly recognizes her as the true mother.¹

Similar to the biblical story about King Solomon’s wise judgment, this Chinese tale was immortalized as 灰阑记 (Story of the Chalk Circle), by the playwright Li Qianfu of the Yuan dynasty, before Shakespeare’s time. The poetic drama was first introduced to the West through a French translation in 1832 and then liberally rendered into German by the flamboyant poet Klabund (Alfred Henschke) in 1924. In the German version, while Hai-tang works as a teahouse girl—euphemism for a prostitute—a prince falls in love with her, but she is bought by the evil man Ma, who is the root cause of her plight because he bankrupted her father and drove him to his death. After her ordeal, the former prince, now the emperor, saves Hai-tang by the scheme of the chalk circle and marries her at the end. In 1929, James Laver translated the German version into English as The Circle of Chalk, which caught the eye of Basil Dean, a former actor turned stage director and an influential impresario in Britain’s film and theater world. Deciding to put Laver’s rendition on stage, Dean cast about, as he later recalled, “for an actress, almond-eyed, if possible,” to play the part of Hai-tang.² The original meaning of Hai-tang is “begonia,” a delicate flower of bright colors, or a social butterfly. In 1929 London, no one would fit Dean’s preference better than the Chinese American flapper who had just stepped into the limelight with Pavement Butterfly and Piccadilly. Thus, with no professional stage training, and having done only a handful of vaudeville gigs, Anna May was chosen as the principal lady in a major production in Shakespeare’s milieu.

Critics were right in calling the 1929 staging of The Circle of Chalk a “study of chinoiserie.” To ensure that the play was as authentically “Chinese” as Limehouse fiction, Dean was meticulous about all aspects of the production. He gave exacting directives to the set designer:

Begin by enclosing the stage space in a box as wide as the proscenium arch itself; swing doors right and left at the back for entrances and exits; ceiling, walls, floors, all in black lacquer; in the center of the stage an oblong turntable on which various scenes—the tea house, the magistrate’s court, etc.—can be built back to back. The final scene, the throne room of the Imperial Palace, will occupy the whole platform; all this inner scenery to be painted and decorated in Chinese red lacquer and gold.

In other words, Dean wanted a proverbial Chinese box.³

For music, Dean hired composer Ernest Irving, whose taste notoriously bordered on eccentricity. In fact, Irving’s orchestra included many strange instruments: gongs, drums of various kinds, a cello adapted for the Chinese fiddle, a marimba, and a woodwind rarity called a heckelphone.⁴ It was reminiscent of the ragtag Chinese orchestra that accompanied Shosho’s dance at the Piccadilly Club.

For the libretto, Dean sprinkled the dialogue with ersatz Oriental dainties, at times as formalized as a Confucian saying, and at others flowery like a Charlie Chan aphorism: “I am your most unworthy servant,” “May a thousand mosquitoes buzz in his brain, and a thousand wasps sting his eyes and blind him!” and “I swear by the bones of my ancestors.” Hai-tang’s lines were also highly stylized, mixing Ben Jonson’s Volpone or William Wycherley’s Country Wife with an Oriental pitch and rhythm: “I fear your Majesty’s anger. You glower upon me like a wolf or tiger, ready to devour me if I do not obey you. But I cannot do it. I bore this child under my heart for nine months. Nine months have I lived with him, nine months longer than other people. I have known all sweetness with him, and all bitterness without him.”⁵

To prepare for her London stage debut, Anna May binged on British literature, trying to familiarize herself with the dramatic tradition that had produced the likes of Shakespeare, Jonson, and Dryden. She even read up on Bertrand Russell in order to get a better handle on the British attitude toward the Chinese. After his yearlong tour and lecturing in China in 1920, the Cambridge philosopher had written extensively about the millennia-old civilization, culminating in a book of essays titled The Problem of China (1922). Writing at a time when China was viewed as weak and backward, or even dubbed “the sick man of East Asia,” Russell rose above the racial bias and provided a shrewd assessment of Chinese problems. Contrasting China with the West, Russell praised the Chinese love of “knowledge, art, instinctive happiness, and relations of friendship or affection.” He wrote, “China is better than we are. Our prosperity, and most of what we endeavor to secure for ourselves, can only be obtained by widespread oppression and exploitation of weaker nations, while the Chinese are not strong enough to injure other countries, and secure whatever they enjoy by means of their own merits and exertions alone.” China may seem weak now, he felt, but it is patient: “It thinks of centuries as other nations think of decades. It is essentially indestructible, and can afford to wait.” Russell characterized the Chinese patience as a “pacific temper,” which he argued would bode well for the future of China.⁶ These assessments by a world-class philosopher had a profound impact on Anna May, who had been looking to reconnect with her Chinese roots, a spiritual journey that would one day take her to China.

On March 14, 1929, The Circle of Chalk opened at the New Theatre in London’s West End. Though the mob scene was not as raucous as that for Lord Byron or Rudolph Valentino, fans thronged the theater to catch a glimpse of the movie star. They waited on the street, young men in their best clothes, “combing their hair and knotting and reknotting their ties,” and young women with their locks sheared in the style of their idol.⁷ While various styles of bangs, or “fringes,” had been worn by both men and women since ancient Greece, they became controversial periodically when conservative clergy regarded women who cut and curled their hair into bangs as representing “a slide into mortal sin.” In the Victorian era, after Alexandra, Princess of Wales (later Queen of England as wife of King Edward VII), started wearing her hair in short, frizzy fringes, the style caught on with young British women.⁸ Now Anna May had introduced a new version: The Wong look was not curly or wavy, but blunt in the front and straight in the back. Among her British fans, some women even painted their faces ivory with powder, in imitation of “the Wong complexion.”⁹

Despite the frenzy, the show was, shall we say, a mixed bag. As a stage novice, Anna May held her ground pretty well. Her performance of a lotus dance almost brought down the house. One reviewer stated: “She is enchanting. Her bowings, her swayings, her slitherings, her bendings, her stops and her starts excited to ecstasy. As a dancer, she is the soul of eloquence.”¹⁰ In contrast, Laurence Olivier, still a young actor of trifling repute, gave a truly lackluster performance. Donning a gorgeous primrose silk robe, the future theatrical giant played the Chinese prince in yellowface and overdid his makeup and his imitation of Chinese gesticulations and speech. He was roundly roasted by reviewers, with one critic commenting sarcastically, “Here he had become what he had always wanted to be, a leading man in the West End. And he was practically throwing away the opportunity to expand himself. It wasn’t that Larry was bad because he had insufficient talent and couldn’t help it. It was as if he was being bad deliberately.”¹¹ Some years later, Sir Larry would again be “bad deliberately,” doing Othello in blackface.

Most of the criticism, however, was reserved for Anna May’s vocal delivery. For those expecting to hear a stereotypical high-pitched, bell-like voice with an Asian accent, she shocked them with her sotto voce California twang. Taken aback, one critic denigrated her voice as being “guttural and uncultivated,” dreadfully incongruent with the lightness and delicacy of her bodily movements.¹² Another reviewer wrote, “As soon as the great Anna May opened her mouth, her squeaky American voice shattered any attempt at illusion.”¹³ As the director responsible for casting Anna May, Basil Dean was the one most disappointed: “But oh! That California accent! As thick as the smog that now smothers their cities. Try as she might—and she did try—Anna May couldn’t get rid of it. In Berlin they had made no complaint. After all, why should they? She was making a silent film.” Dean considered it a miscalculation on his part by underestimating “the strong prejudice, amounting to almost total rejection in some cases of the American accent in English plays at that time, just as the British accent was resented on Broadway.” Dean regretted his own folly in engaging a silent-film actress when, as he condescendingly put it, “any attractive English ingenue with good voice and gesture might well have carried the production to success.”¹⁴ At the end of the eight-week run, Anna May attended a lunch with newspaper critics. Responding to a question about her voice, she remarked that she wished the reviewers “could make up their mind whether she had a New York or Hollywood accent.” She then switched to Cantonese so that none of them could understand her.¹⁵

Her defiance and playfulness notwithstanding, the question of her voice signaled a major issue emerging in the performance world at the time. As the motion picture industry hurtled from silent films to talkies, many stars of the bygone era fell by the wayside, because the utterance of one syllable was sometimes enough to dispel all the beautiful illusions they had studiously curated in the silent world. The same challenge would soon face Anna May. The debacle of The Circle of Chalk sounded an alarm gong for her. While some critics, dismayed by her vocal performance, predicted that “Anna in talkies will not be the same as Anna of silent screen,”¹⁶ it remained to be seen whether she could, or would, successfully enter the world of sound.