Fanshen

The Asian Plays #1

by David Hare

Based on William Hinton's book, this play recounts in vividly dramatic form how the people of a remote Chinese village come to terms with Communism.

Genres: Plays

85 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

Sir David Hare (born 5 June 1947) is an English playwright, screenwriter and theatre and film director. Most notable for his stage work, Hare has also enjoyed great success with films, receiving two Academy Award nominations for Best Adapted Screenplay for writing The Hours in 2002, based on the novel written by Michael Cunningham, and The Reader in 2008, based on the novel of the same name written by Bernhard Schlink.

On West End, he had his greatest success with the plays Plenty, which he adapted into a film starring Meryl Streep in 1985, Racing Demon (1990), Skylight (1997), and Amy's View (1998). The four plays ran on Broadway in 1982–83, 1996, 1998 and 1999 respectively, earning Hare three Tony Award nominations for Best Play for the first three and two Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play. Other notable projects on stage include A Map of the World, Pravda, Murmuring Judges, The Absence of War and The Vertical Hour. He wrote screenplays for the film Wetherby and the BBC drama Page Eight (2011).

As of 2013, Hare has received two Academy Award nominations, three Golden Globe Award nominations, three Tony Award nominations and has won a BAFTA Award, a Writers Guild of America Award for Best Adapted Screenplay and two Laurence Olivier Awards. He has also been awarded several critics' awards such as the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and received the Golden Bear in 1985. He was knighted in 1998.

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Ha...

Reviews

[Hank Lin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Haha, you must give David Hare credit! One of the few writers to seamlessly balance a piece both as a historical document and as a dramatic work through which his own aesthetic must permeate. Disbelievers will say he lays a bit too much weight on the historical document side, as Fanshen seems at times to be a shopping list of what some people did remotely in China a couple years back. Hare keeps is starkly relevant and current, not because it has lots of cultural references to iPods or youtube like so many masquerading "contemporary" plays do, but because he writes of the lifeblood and efforts of real people, still alive at the time he was writing. People who didn't just win one particular soccer game, or design an interesting android app, but who acted in violence and defense to seize a medieval China and bring it gasping and bleeding into the modern world. Their passion and Hares are felt.

Where people would argue that he keeps to studied a distance, I would argue Hare is painfully close to his subjects. He doesn't write of China, or the government, or of communism in general, but of one town's specific understanding of it and transformative assimilation of it. Just as democracy wasn't a fixed idea to the French or the Americans, Fanshen and communism are something new, questionable, and malleable to these men and women. They grapple to find its definition, as Aeschylus' Athena and Orestes do for the word justice; that, to me, is the most modern and relevant a piece of theater can get.