The wrinkles on his face are what capture your attention when you first meet Wu Hsing-kuo. Creases around the eyes, offsetting the large bags beneath, appear when he is about to say something important, and the deep lines around his nose, which form two brackets around his thin lips, give the illusion of a false beard and whiskers.
These deep lines have seen the 58-year-old actor through many classical Peking Opera performances, where he has played historical figures such as Zhuang Zi, Qu Yuan, Yue Fei and Chiang Kai-Shek.
In one of his most impressive performances, The Hegemon King Says Farewell to his Queen – a tragedy about a King and his lover set in the Han Dynasty – Wu played King Xiang Yu in front of thrilled French audiences, who thought they were watching an ancient Greek tragedy.
Wu is known for his innovative adaptations of Western classics such as Macbeth, The Tempest, King Lear and Hamlet into traditional Peking Opera.
The Times even compared him to Laurence Olivier, one of the most famous and revered actors of the 20th century, renowned for his roles in Shakespeare plays. Ariane Mnouchkine, founder of the Parisian avant-garde stage ensemble Théâtre du Soleil, said Wu was a "great performer".
Born into tradition
"Despite all the innovative work I have done, I was trained for tradition," Wu said in a speech at Chiao Tung University, based in western Taiwan's Hsinchu city.
"Although I haven't sung any parts of a traditional Peking Opera play in twenty years, I can still do it," he said. "It feels like an inmate being released after twenty years in prison."
Originally named Kuo-Chiu, Wu was born in 1953 in Kao-siung, a city located in southwestern Taiwan.
His father passed away before Wu turned one. He was later sent to the Taipei-based Fu Hsing Opera School, the predecessor of the National Taiwan College of Performing Arts (NTCPA), at the age of eleven. There, he was re-named "Hsing" (revival) by the headmaster, who was determined to revive Chinese traditional culture.
The school offered accommodation and meals, but had a strict management system which allowed teachers to beat students if they did not do well at learning the skill of Peking Opera. Sometimes, one who did well would be beaten along with the others who did not, a method of instilling a collective spirit that teachers tried to build among students.
Besides the beatings, students suffered from hunger as well, leaving Wu and his classmates with no choice but to steal steamed buns from the cafeteria.
"Back then, I was too busy practicing and avoiding getting beaten. I didn't have time to think about whether I liked Peking Opera or not," Wu said.
Missing her son in Taipei, Wu's mother sent him many letters, which his classmates borrowed to read but never returned. Wu burned the letters in anger, half at his classmates and half at his mother for sending him to the schoo
Burning those letters became something Wu would regret. "My grandfather stayed in the Chinese mainland after the civil war, and my mother fled to Taiwan by herself. I knew that she did not have a choice (about sending Wu to the school) after my father died," he recalled.
However, his own plight eventually helped Wu identify with the roles he played on stage. "That was the moment I found myself mesmerized by the opera," he said.
From the peak to the bottom
In 1978, Wu felt like the whole world was spinning under his feet.
At the recommendation of the Fu Hsing Opera School he was sent to the Chinese Culture University for advanced study, where he trained under Master Chou Cheng-jung and became a leading dancer in Lin Hwai-min's Cloud Gate Dance Theatre. With Peking Opera and contemporary dancing, Wu felt his career peak.
Despite all the success, Chou was very hard on Wu, since the idea of "a strict teacher producing outstanding students" was so accepted in the culture and part of almost every Chinese master-apprentice relationship, not only in Peking Opera.
"Contemporary dance was something from the West, a foreign form of art. It's not in your blood!!" Chou told Wu.
In 1984, as the leading Wu Sheng (male martial) of the army's Lu Guang Theater, one of the "Big Three" military theaters in Taiwan, Wu still respected Chou in the old ways, with all the rituals required by the opera community.
"There was already a modern society in Taiwan, but we still lived a traditional master-and-apprentice way of life," Wu recalled. "Master Chou was quite strict with me, and in order to reinforce the basic moves of opera dance, he only taught me one play in six years."
The theatre started to lose patience with such a slow pace of teaching and eventually hired a new teacher for Wu – an insult to Chou that put Wu in an awkward position.
One day, after Wu missed a basic move during practice, Chou beat him with a cane.
"What are you thinking? Haven't you done your homework?" said Chou, waving the cane. Subconsciously, Wu blocked Chou's abuse, saying: "Please, master, I am a 32-year-old man, not a child anymore. Don't beat me, please."
Wu knew then that it was the end of their master and apprentice relationship. But what he did not know was that both he and Chou would soon witness the decline of Peking Opera in Taiwan.
In the early 90s, Chou and other performers went on a trip to visit with some soldiers. To his surprise, the soldiers sitting in front of him did not even pay attention to his meticulous performance.
Many years later, Wu had a chance to read Master Chou's diary. He found that Chou was thinking about many things, such as: "What did I perform today? How should I improve my performance?" Although such spirit impressed many people, including Wu, opera performers like Chou went out of business in the early 90s, as the younger generation became distracted by movies and popular music.
