BEIJING -- One of Ireland's most innovative theater companies, Pan Pan Theater, reckons the universal themes of J.M. Synge's "Playboy of the Western World" will strike a chord in the Eastern World, too. On Feb. 13, Pan Pan started rehearsals for a Chinese version in Beijing.
The production will be performed in Mandarin with an all-Chinese cast, lifting Christy Mahon and his beloved Pegeen Mike out of their natural habitat in County Mayo in the early years of the previous century and placing them in a hairdressing and foot massage salon in the rapidly vanishing outskirts of contemporary Beijing.
True to the spirit of the play, the Chinese "Playboy" will use plenty of contemporary Chinese idiom and slang, although it remains to be seen if the Beijing opening will cause quite the same stir it did when it bowed in Dublin nearly 100 years ago, stoking nationalist flames and testing the boundaries of decency.
Helmer Gavin Quinn, a co-founder of Pan Pan who also adapted the play, says the Chinese thesps found the play very funny.
"The cast is extremely conscientious, disciplined and hard-working," Quinn says. "They really want to make it work."Giving the play a contempo edge should help overcome any lingering local-audience suspicions about Western theater. And Synge's story of the antihero Mahon should a strike chord in China, with its parallels in modern Chinese literature and classical philosophy.
"Playboy" will run in the Beijing Oriental Pioneer Theater, which is affiliated with the Grand National Theater Company of China. It runs March 16-25.
The drama will be jointly produced by Pan Pan, Beijing Oriental Pioneer Theater, Vallejo Gantner (ex-director of the Dublin Fringe Festival and director of Gotham legit venue P.S. 122) and Beijing-based independent film and stage producer Zhaohui Wang.
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