Scripts of creativity

Swiss playwright Antoinette Rychner's work L'enfant, mode d'emploi envisions a world where children are like commodities that can be customized and ordered online.

This science fiction story tells of a young couple's struggle while expecting their first child, in particular the different levels of concern and quandary experienced by the two.

At the recent Sound and Fury Play Reading Festival in Beijing, the audience gathered at an exhibition hall of the U2 by Ullens Center for Contemporary Art to watch the actors, with scripts in hand, giving a performance of the play's Chinese rendition.

"In this setting, supposedly it should not be difficult to achieve gender equality within a family," says Chen Ran, director of the play and co-curator of the festival. "But as the story progresses, the audience will see how the age-old division of labor in families influences this couple."

In June 2021, the team hosted a one-week translation workshop on Swiss plays, where the directors, Swiss playwrights, more than 40 translators of French and German and a dozen actors and actresses together discussed the scripts via video conferencing.

At the workshop, Chen learned that Rychner wrote the script based on her personal experience of giving birth and raising children, who also highlighted that in Swiss families, mothers usually need to reduce their working hours after giving birth.

"Apart from answering our questions, she generously shared with us her life experience, that she gave birth to her first child at the age of 19, which required her to 'grow up' overnight. And when she was writing this play, she was pregnant with her second child," Chen says.

Rychner also showed a great interest in the team's opinions on having children, team members' personal experiences, and China's relevant policies.

Chen says the works she chooses to stage are always related to the social issues she is interested in. The play is based on the writer's individual experience and the issues discussed in it are relevant to Chinese society.

The play-reading festival started in 2018 as a platform for scriptwriters and theater practitioners, aimed at building an environment where young talent can generate and exchange ideas.

This year, the festival was hosted at the U2 by UCCA from Aug 12 to 14, with support from the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia and One-Way Street, a Chinese literary periodical.

Four representative contemporary plays from Switzerland were presented during the festival, covering the themes of life and death, feminist utopia, childbearing and aging.

While focusing on the script, Sound and Fury's productions strive for the integrity of live performances.

Instead of merely listening to the script being read, the audience can watch the director's rendition and get a feel for a complete production via the performances.

"Our performances are very close to a full-scale theater production. They are demos, concentrating more on the ideas rather than the production. The purpose is cultural exchange, to introduce the latest international theater scripts to the Chinese audience in an efficient way," Chen says.

According to her, each year Sound and Fury attracts a number of theaters, troupes, production companies and practitioners. Some works that were well-received have been selected by organizations and presented as complete theater productions.

"This seemingly simple and crude combination of script-reading and performance maximizes the power of the script that goes to permeate the entire space, so that the audience can access the core issues without being confused by the styles of performances or the techniques of the directors," theater critic Shui Jing says.

Over the past five years, the team of Sound and Fury has been hosting events, including play-reading performances, lectures in playwriting, translation workshops and screenings.

The performances were livestreamed in 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to Chen Si'an, artistic director of the festival, the team is working on conducting a writing group for young dramatists next year, who will work together for a period of six to eight months.

It will also continue to host translation workshops to facilitate exchanges among different theater roles and cultural backgrounds.

"What we can do is to create a small but lively creative community, where playwrights and theater practitioners can exercise their talents in a free, tolerant, uninhibited and cooperative atmosphere," Chen Si'an says.