Showing a revolution

Fanshen may well be without precedent in the history of British theatre. A dramatisation of the chronicle history by William Hinton of land reform in the Chinese village of Long Bow in 1947, it puts onto the stage a descriptive model of the process of a successful revolution. In introducing themselves, each of the people tells of external, verifiable facts and each states his or her position in economic rather than personal terms. The subsistence existence of a pre-industrial village is precisely quantified in simple objects, each of which has a vital practical significance to the peasants. On stage, they become emblematic: it is a quilt which carries the weight of the first redistribution after fanshen, a tangible improvement in one person's life implying the improvement in everyone's lives.

The uncluttered simplicity of the language built upon those basic objects and on the natural environment echoes the imagistic style of Chinese poetry. Hare's paring away of usual shades of literary encumbrance in his own work and English drama as a whole is a function of the fact that these people have neither the luxury nor the moral preoccupations of the west. It is a language where our senses of ‘good and bad don't come into it’ (p. 50).

Since the title is the only Chinese word in the play and is repeated constantly throughout, it carries the more resonant significance. Literally it means ‘to turn the body or to turn over’ (p. 15) and to understand that word is to understand the revolution.