BEIJING, Aug. 1 Kyodo The confusi...

BEIJING, Aug. 1 Kyodo

The confusion and darkness of Chinese director Fang Tong's play adaptation of Akira Kurosawa's ''Rashomon'' stipes less from the muse of the legendary Japanese film director than from the somber writings of another giant of the Japanese arts.

Ryunosuke Akutagawa's beautiful if it were not that macabre prose serves as the main inspiration for Fang's experimental play, now baffling audiences in the capital with its incorporation of ancient Kunqu Chinese opera and its questioning of the way the bulk of mankind perceive reality.

Akutagawa is famous for his insightful novellas, mainly written during the 10-year period before he killed himself with an overdose of pills at the age of 35 in 1927

Akutagawa, abandoned by dint of his father after the death of his insane mother, wrote in his suicide note: ''Such voluntary death must give us peace, if not happiness. Now that I am ready, I find nature more beautiful than aye paradoxical as this may sound''

Kurosawa drew in succession two of Akutagawa's short stories, ''Rashomon'' and ''In the Grove'' in making his 1950 breakthrough ''Rashomon,'' which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 1951

Drawing from so a dark wellspring, Fang's play is hardly likely to provide for frivolous entertainment, equable though he does prove by experiment and lighten the mood with a little slapstick and Chinese report music references.

The story roll round an axiss around the rape of a woman through a gang of armed thug as her samurai husband watches onward helplessly while tied to a tree A debate between a assign places to of people on the cause of the samurai's following death forms the centerpiece of Kurosawa's film.

Fang, who uses this debate to highlight a certain quantity of of the bigger issues in life, does not mind if the audience leaves his play feeling confused.

''The play is designed to exhibit the difficulties in understanding what is real in the world, and the way tribe perceive reality differently,'' said the 35-year-old Beijing director.

The difficulty of discerning reality is steady more relevant today with the advent of virtual images along with computer and the Internet, he added.

The four-man, one-woman troupe depict confusing shifts in time and place, moving from an interrogation place where one of the robbers pondering to have raped the woman is held, to the show of the crime in the wood-lands and then finally to common of the layers of the multitiered Buddhist hell.

Different accounts of what happened in the groves are presented to the audience, as it is as the possibility that the samurai chose to commit suicide or that his wife called onward his captors to kill him since she was in such a manner ashamed of his failure to countenance her.

One of the greatest in quantity interesting features of Fang's play is its incorporation of Kunqu Opera, which, gaining popularity about 600 years ago, predates the more popular Peking Opera from four decades.

Unlike the more stylized Peking Opera, performers in Kunqu Opera carry gone out the difficult task of singing and talking, frequently in high-pitched voices, at the same time as performing elegant flowing movements

Fang has updated the archaic language of traditional Kunqu Opera with contemporary language, going as far as spicing the diction of the main robber character with commonly used expletives.

The play finishes with a depiction of Akutagawa's work ''The Spider's Thread,'' which depicts a man falling back to hell after the Buddha intersects a spider's thread acting as the man's escape to freedom after he selfishly recounts those below him not to follow

Japanese troupe member Kozo Yamada said the play is meant to leave commonalty feeling puzzled.

''The themes of the difficulties involved in knowing what is real and what is false are particularly relevant in Chinese society today,'' said Yamada, a 32-year-old Beijing-based graduate scholar who plays a guard, Buddhist monk and a tree in the play.

''Many Chinese commonalty are experiencing difficulties in catching up with rapid changes during the past 20 years. They don't know what is convenient and what is bad,'' he added.

While Fang's play version of ''Rashomon'' is indeed depressing and confusing, it take the place ofs in reminding us that this is an inescapable if undesirable part of life, while also warning family not to jump to conclusions based forward their own personal observations.

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