When playwright Davey
Anderson travelled to Beijing with Scavengers, as short play written
for students at the Royal Conservatoire in Glasgow, he was exposed to
a world of Chinese theatre that went beyond the Golden Hedgehog
festival of student drama which Scavengers was appearing at. Anderson
was taken to the Beijing Fringe Festival, where lots of home-grown
work made largely by directors was being shown.
“I saw very little
new work,” Anderson recalls, “and that made me curious about
where all the new writers were. I've actually seen very little work
by Chinese writers, but I knew there must be some, and that there
were great stories out there about China today.”
Through the auspices of
the National Theatre of China, Anderson put out an open call for
writers. This was, he admits, “a mad idea, just inviting all these
writers into as room with us to scribble.”
After whittling the
writers down to a ten-strong group, Anderson put them with three
Scottish writers, including himself alongside Rona Munro and
Catherine Grosvenor, to attempt to translate the completed plays. The
results of this can be seen in New Plays From China, a season of
three new plays presented by the National Theatre of Scotland in
partnership with Oran Mor, as well as several Chinese partners and
the University of Edinburgh-based Confucius Institute For Scotland.
“Plays translated
from mandarin into English are few and far between,” Anderson
admits. “They can be difficult to translate, which is why we wanted
to pair the Chinese writers with Scottish ones. Part of it is a
cultural thing as well in terms of theatrical form. In China they
tell stories that have a deep understanding of metaphor and symbolism
in a way that we're not used to seeing in western writers work.
There's also the context of censorship, which writers in China have
to deal with every day. Whereas when you can say anything you can be
ignored, if you do say something controversial in China, it will be
noticed, so you have all these writers bursting with things to say,
but who can't say them directly.”
New Plays From China
forms the third in an annual series of seasons involving new work
from lesser-known cultures. While the first introduced audiences to
translations from Latin America, last year's look at work by writers
from middle eastern countries was more politically pertinent. The
Chinese writers turn the spotlight on their society in an equally
serious manner.
The first play of the
season, Secrets, written by Lin Weiran and adapted by Rona Munro,
opened at Oran Mor yesterday in a production by Graeme Maley. It
tells the story of a married woman's former lover who turns up on her
doorstep after disappearing without warning two years earlier. This
is followed next week by Thieves and Boy, Hao Jingfang's comic crime
caper about a pair of vigilantes burgling a corrupt government
official's home. This play is adapted and directed by Anderson
himself.
The final play of the
season, Fox Attack, is Xu Nuo's story about a driven young pianist
who commits a shocking crime to save his own skin, an who then has to
explain why he is late home to his overbearing mother. Fox Attack has
been adapted by Catherine Grosvenor for a production by Amanda
Gaughan.
While it was by no
means deliberate that all three writers with varying degrees of
playwriting experience are women, it is nevertheless a significant
statement. It remains to be seen whether any of the plays will be
seen in their homeland, though Anderson is confident, both about the
current season, and further plays waiting in the wings, both from
China and further afield.
“The writers are very
clever,” he observes, “and they're not saying anything that might
be silenced. There are things going on in both the background and
the foreground of these plays that are absolutely about China now,
stuff about inequality between the rich and the poor, about having to
behave in a certain way and other things that rip society apart, but
which are also about here and now beyond China. That's what excited
me about these three plays. They rang a bell.”
Secrets, Oran Mor,
Glasgow until April 27th, 1pm, then Bedlam Theatre,
Edinburgh, April 30th-May 4th, 1pm. Thieves and Boys and
Fox Attack follow.
The Herald, April 23rd 2013
ends
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