Escape SH: daring theatre and ancient canals at Wuzhen festival
Photograph: Jakub Halun, CC by SA 4.0
Now in its sixth year, the Wuzhen Theatre Festival returns to present creative, daring shows in one of China’s most beautiful settings, a 1,000-year-old water town that celebrates both modern and traditional arts and lies only ninety minutes from Shanghai. With the festival running from October 18-28, and shows playing throughout the day, there is plenty to choose from.
Getting to Wuzhen from Shanghai is easy. A car will take 90 minutes to two hours, and there are two hour direct buses (55RMB each way) from Shanghai South Bus Station. You can also take the bullet train to Hangzhou first, then grab a cab or bus. Once you're there, don't miss these shows. Visit wuzhenfestival.com for more details.
Teahouse
In reimagining this Lao She classic, China’s hugely influential theatremaker Meng Jinghui has cast four directors as his main actors who help him shape the show’s direction. Traditionally, China’s teahouses saw cross-sections of society meeting to play out human dramas; Lao’s story chronicles characters such as a eunuch, a slave girlturned-waitress, a one-time Manchu noble who now sells vegetables, a fortune-teller and an opium addict. If Meng has a signature, it is slick, hip shows featuring attractive young performers doubling as rock musicians, so his take on this period piece is anyone’s guess. But it will be memorable. In Chinese with Chinese and English surtitles.
📍 Thu 18-Sun 21. 7.30pm. 50-880RMB.
500 Meters
Photograph: Christoph Lepschy, courtesy Wuzhen Theatre Festival
The most important experimental theatre collective to emerge from China, Paper Tiger Theater Studio has spent two decades gracing international festivals and amassing eager collaborators. In this multilingual co-production (with Chinese and English surtitles) with Thalia Theatre Hamburg and the Goethe Institut, among others, director Tian Gebing presents a work inspired by Kafka’s Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer, which describes the Great Wall as the ultimate in collective construction that defies space and time. Gebing sets this ancient achievement against the country’s modern ambitions, and alongside the view from Europe, both yesterday and today.
📍 Fri 26-Sat 27. 9.30pm. 380RMB.
19.14
Photograph: Ekaterina Tsvetkovao, courtesy Chekhov Moscow Art Theatre, Wuzhen Theatre Festival
Mustard gas, trenches, the Archduke Ferdinand – the Great War may have propelled combat into the modern age, but even these horrors were soon eclipsed by other wars to end all wars, and memories began to fade. But writer/director Alexander Molochnikov and the Moscow Art Theatre bring them roaring back. Based on diaries and letters of French and German soldiers, 19.14 (in Russian with Chinese and English surtitles) uses the raucous, coarse and often witty genre of cabaret to present stories of youths eager for adventure who were soon drowning in mud, disease and death. A creative take on the first forgotten war.
📍 Tue 23-Wed 24. 2.30pm (Wed 24 only) and 7.30pm. 50-680RMB.
Andares
Photograph: Benito Juarez, courtesy Wuzhen Theatre Festival
Modern society’s greatest conundrum? How to preserve the old while embracing the new. Director Héctor Flores Komatsu looks at Mexico’s indigenous youth through their personal stories, ancestral myths and traditional arts. This provides context for their current struggles with land usurpation, violence, community resistance and ancestral duties, as ‘progress’ clashes with tradition. In Spanish with Chinese and English surtitles.
📍 Sat 20-Wed 24. 11pm. 280RMB.
The Fat Black Women Sing
Photograph: courtesy production, Wuzhen Theatre Festival
Writer and director Napo Masheane takes us behind the scenes at a South African jazz club where five full-figured singers talk about food, relationships, prejudice and how they finally learned to love their fabulous bodies. In stories told through dialogue and song, this is a peek at a seldom-seen sisterhood that is both distant and utterly relatable. In Sotho, Zulu, Xhosa and English with Chinese and English surtitles.
📍 Mon 22, 4pm and 9.30pm; Tue 23, 2pm and 7pm. 280-350RMB.
Dancing in the Dark
Photograph: Krafft Angerer, courtesy Wuzhen Theatre Festival
An immigrant factory-worker is racing against time; her eyesight is deteriorating, but since her son has the same condition, her earnings go toward his surgery. Her only solace comes in the sunny, glamorous world of MGM musicals, where darkness doesn’t exist. But when a neighbour steals her precious savings, the fantasy turns deadly. Based on Lars von Trier’s 2000 film, director Bastian Kraft’s stage version (in German with English and Chinese surtitles) uses complex lighting designs to immerse audiences in a similar state of encroaching blindness. Presented by Hamburg’s Thalia Theatre.
📍 Thu 18, 8pm; Fri 19-Sat 20, 9pm. 280-480RMB.
Wuzhen Theatre Festival
Wuzhen Scenic Zone, Thu 18-Sun 28. Extract the QR code below for more details and to book tickets.