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The Review - THEATRE by JOHN COURTNEY O'CONNOR
Published: 10 July 2008

Red letter play tugs at the heart strings for Comrade Brown

FANSHEN
295 Regent Street

“THE Party must be the backbone of the village,” we are told by a young man curiously dressed in a quilted jacket and cotton trousers, sporting a rather posh accent, and “Without the Party, the village will be like a bowl of loose sand”.
The Party in question is not some “cool gig, up West” but the Chinese Communist Party in David Hare’s 1975 play, which is based on American writer William Hinton’s book Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village – an account of how land reform was implemented in the village of Long Bow in China.
Hinton worked with the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in 1947.
He remained there working as a tractor technician and teacher until 1953. In Long Bow, northern China, he witnessed first-hand the Chinese Revolution.
Not the stuff of West End theatre or of having the punters running up and down the aisles, you might think!
However, director Roland Smith’s energetic and well-paced production creates its own theatrical magic – a well-chosen and timely revival of Hare’s often-forgotten piece.
Having the production staged in a crumbling space, behind The Property Merchant Group building in Regent Street, is truly subversive.
The Property Group specialises in sustainable buildings for major occupiers and long-term investors. As Uncle Karl Marx might have said: “A contradiction!”
A cast of 10 actors – twentysomething, with three women – played more than 30 different roles.
I would have preferred the actors to have employed a range of different dialects but I guess the idea was to show a uniformity which is easily identified in Chairman Mao’s “camp” tunic surrounded by Party hacks with the same outfit.
The Utopian concept of the Peasants’ Revolution and the “re-making” of people comes to a galloping standstill when the village eventually realises that it cannot eradicate greed, crime, power struggles and personal vanities.
It makes one almost feel sorry for Comrade Gordon Brown.
Until August 2
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