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The Crowd
Inspired by Gustave Le Bon's prophetic 1894 study of crowd psychology The A Study of Popular Mind and Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the People , The Crowd is a searing play by China's most produced living playwright, Yu Rongjun. Set in Chongqing, Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong, from the Cultural Revolution to the present day, The Crowd pitches the forces of irrational mass frenzy against the powerless struggle of the individual―with tragic consequences. This daring play investigates one man's struggle to seek justice at all costs; and culminates in a rendezvous on a fateful day in Hong Kong. Will revenge settle old scores or open up new wounds?
212 pages, Paperback
Published November 1, 2015
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
March 4, 2025
Resources online around this play are scarce which means the problems I have with this play might be misinformed.
First of all, the translation appears extremely poor, action and dialogue are clubbed together which is only understood by a really careful reading.
Secondly, I can see how as a script for a play this edition might work since instead of having just having character names before every scene it just has 'man 1', 'man 2', 'woman 1' and so on followed by the character name, which would streamline an actor's job by letting them know 'you are man 1 throughout the play' but from a reader's perspective this is extremely annoying since I constantly had to come back to the first page of a scene to see what character was being played by which 'man', adding to this the fact that in some portions multiple roles are played by the same 'man' or 'woman' made it even tougher to get through.
I need to engage with some material surrounding this work before solidifying my opinions but if I were to generally comment on it, I would say it's a decent read with a solid story and social commentary under the horrendous translation.
First of all, the translation appears extremely poor, action and dialogue are clubbed together which is only understood by a really careful reading.
Secondly, I can see how as a script for a play this edition might work since instead of having just having character names before every scene it just has 'man 1', 'man 2', 'woman 1' and so on followed by the character name, which would streamline an actor's job by letting them know 'you are man 1 throughout the play' but from a reader's perspective this is extremely annoying since I constantly had to come back to the first page of a scene to see what character was being played by which 'man', adding to this the fact that in some portions multiple roles are played by the same 'man' or 'woman' made it even tougher to get through.
I need to engage with some material surrounding this work before solidifying my opinions but if I were to generally comment on it, I would say it's a decent read with a solid story and social commentary under the horrendous translation.
Displaying 1 of 1 review