OzAsia Festival. Her Majesty's Theatre. 17 Sep 2013.
Upon the stage of Her Majesty's one walks a ring of path rimmed by tall bamboos. It's just like the panda area at the Adelaide Zoo, only there are three pandas at the centre of this forest and they are playing cards at a big red table.
They are Chinese actors, Zhu Yutong, Wang Jinglei and Sun Yue, who also is writer of this striking hour of theatre. Directed by Gavin Quinn it is a collaborative production by Ireland's Pan Pan Theatre and Square Moon Culture Ltd of Beijing. This explains why, from a country renown for censorship and control, there arrives a theatre piece which is surprisingly agit prop, albeit with an absurdist bent.
Emerging from the path, some members of the audience are guided to join the actors at the table. They sit there like startled deer in the headlights. The rest surround them in a circle. The sight lines are not always good, but the style is immersive and one soon goes with the flow.
After extended card-shuffling, the game of Fight the Landlord begins. It is an old Chinese game which reflects the political issues of China's Cultural Revolution. But the players are Gen Y. Theirs is the idiom of social media, Western music, fashion, cars, gossip columns and the great Chinese real estate expansion. They'd all like to be landlords these days.
Between sets of the game, the three players discuss their life and times, sometimes in humorous riffs and sometimes in strident declamation. To understand them, the audience must read swiftly from one of three surtitle screens around the stage. It is a struggle, since the performances are lively and intense and one yearns to focus just on the characters which keep changing, the actors vanishing beneath the table to swap seats, sometimes performing in the aisle.
For a production of such audacious audience intimacy, there's still the sense of a fourth wall.
Their panda suits, of course, are a metaphor for the new China - the world of precious only children. But, in their cliched soft toy cuteness, they also present a comic counterpoint to the serious subjects the characters discuss. There's the difficulty of finding a partner, let alone love. There's the struggle to stand out from the crowd, to succeed, to be smart and chic. There's the need to accept mediocrity. There's ennui. There's craven acquisitiveness.
The context may be Chinese, but many of the sentiments are cultural and generational commonalities.
The actors are wonderful, not only in their crossfire of characterisations but also in voice when they sing.
Most certainly, watching card players dressed in panda suits and sitting on a forested stage under fairy lights while contemplating the status quo in modern China is one of those richly unforgettable experiences that tells one there's a festival going on.
When: 17 to 18 Sep
Where: Her Majesty's Theatre
Bookings: bass.net.au
