"the courage and intellectual rigour of the company's efforts make the enterprise as admirable as it is exigent"
THE TIMES

"Director Roland Smith's love of the play is palpable, and his ten-strong cast (including Isaac Jones and James Russell) find admirable chinks of individuality in their 30-odd characters with which to prise them open."
METRO

"theatredelicatessen's committed young company, collectively and individually impressive, show that it's far from earnest agitprop"
THE STAGE

"Roland Smith's energetic and well-paced production creates its own theatrical magic — a well-chosen and timely revival of Hare's often-forgotten piece."
CAMDEN NEW JOURNAL

"Roland Smith's production is clear-headed, and his young cast deserving of its applause"
TIME OUT

"fine production is full of energetic performances and it finishes with a splendid visual flourish. A tough but rewarding night out"
THE SPECTATOR

"Mao caps off and a long, long life to theatredelicatessen for bringing grass-roots land reform to 295 Regent Street in central London, which is in the heart of the Crown Estate"
THE MORNING STAR


Full Reviews for Fanshen

"Under the Nationalists too many taxes. Under the Communists, too many meetings," declares a character in this brave revival of David Hare's 1975 drama. In fact the play, a stark, Brechtian examination of Chinese land reform between the end of the second Sino-Japanese war and the establishment of the People's Republic, itself often feels like a lengthy committee meeting. Detailed discussion is barely leavened by character or action; it's intensely demanding.

In an office block at 295 Regent Street, the enterprising young company theatredelicatessen has found an intriguing space for its production: a crumbling, skylighted room accessed via a shiny modern reception area. If Roland Smith, the director, doesn't entirely succeed in making the piece sing, the courage and intellectual rigour of the company's efforts make the enterprise as admirable as it is exigent.

The action, based on the book Fanshen by William Hinton, chronicles events in the village of Long Bow, population 1,000, from 1945 to 1949. The title literally means "to turn over", to begin anew. With the peasants exploited by greedy landlords and worn out by conflict, the time is ripe for the communists to wrest control from Chiang Kaishek's Kuomintang and create a new China — a place of equality, with government by the people and decisions arrived at after open debate. Of course, the reality fails to match the ideal, with tyranny of one kind replaced by another. The corrosive effects of power lead to violence and abuse; greed interferes with fairness; actions intended to redress past wrongs become the vehicle for vengeance.

The complex problems that attend the establishment of any just political system are brilliantly highlighted by Hare's writing, which combines dialogue with sloganeering and direct audience address. But Smith and his able, multi-role-playing cast of ten are faced with a weighty task in making them engrossing theatre. Chris Gylee's simple set features narrow apertures through which actors peer, suggesting a sense of paranoia and surveillance that unsettlingly preechoes Mao's repressive regime. And in the relentless hairsplitting of the play's interminable meetings and formal self-denunciations is a chilling reminder of the Cultural Revolution, in which the smallest show of subversive thought was crushed.

There are also some nice poor-theatre touches, such as the slamming of wooden slats against the floor to symbolise gunfire. Smith works hard to lend individual colour to Hare's many, scantly differentiated characters. Bethany Webb is especially memorable as a vindictive old bag who cannot wait to see her irksome fellow villagers vilified, while Dan Crow as the corrupt Yu Lai and Isaac Jones as a remorseless idealist are compelling. A challenging evening, yet it has its rewards.
SAM MARLOWE, THE TIMES


In many ways this is a perfectly timed revival, as China readies itself for an Olympic dawn through the haze of her seismic economic expansion. David Hare's 1975 play, based on William Hinton's book, is a precise portrait of the last moment in China's history when wealth was so drastically reallocated, when the land reform of the People's Liberation Army in the 1940s deracinated feudalism almost overnight.

Vast chunks of information are neatly packaged in bold, Brechtian tableaux but the gentle, backhanded humour is all Hare's own. Director Roland Smith's love of the play is palpable, and his ten-strong cast (including Isaac Jones, left, and James Russell, pictured) find admirable chinks of individuality in their 30-odd characters with which to prise them open. There are some clever flourishes too: a blackboard details the wildly fluctuating fortunes of various villagers after yet another meeting and the narration, in particular, is artfully handled. But this journey through the party's definitions of the peasantry, land allocation and who is and isn't an upstanding communist is a long one.

It's fascinating but Fanshen doesn't carry the timeless feel of a study of power's universal and corruptive touch. And Hare's play, in this impressive, impassioned revival, seems too wholly an account of a moment of China's past to bear relevance to the question of its future.
LUCY POWELL, METRO


theatredelicatessen's timely revival of David Hare's 1975 drama based on William Hinton's classic ethnographic study recalls the idealism of two vanished eras.

Firstly, there is the time of the play's setting - a Chinese village in 1947 as the peasants overthrow the feudal system and take the initial awkward steps towards a revolutionary new ordering of society. And then there is the period of the play's creation, a time that seems almost equally distant - seventies Britain.

As it happens, theatredelicatessen does a very good job of recreating the ensemble spirit of the play's original performer, Joint Stock, which developed the play in collaboration with Hare out of collective work that mirrored the action it portrayed. It helps that it has found an ideal site in which to stage the drama, a large warehouse-like space formerly occupied by a music showroom, a few minutes north of the shopping maelstrom that is Oxford Circus.

The audience plays its part, too. Stepping into the semi-derelict site, with its bare walls and dangling cables, each audience member gets a different coloured badge that conveys seating and class status - a red fist for poor peasants, a yellow palm for middle peasants (on slightly more comfortable chairs) and a green hand, forefinger pointing down, for rich peasants and landlords (on raised seating, appropriately).

When the action gets underway, however, class status proves highly problematic as peasants and communist cadres wrestle with the difficulties of putting revolutionary ideas into practice — drama that is tinged with irony now that present-day China is so enthusiastically embracing consumer capitalism. But Hare's play itself hasn't dated as much as you might expect and anticipates his later work in documentary theatre.

Fanshen may not provide the pleasures of rounded characters or narrative flow, but theatredelicatessen's committed young company, collectively and individually impressive, show that it's far from earnest agitprop.
JASON BEST, THE STAGE


"The Party must be the backbone of the village," we are told by a young man curiously dressed in a quilted jacket and cotton trousers, sporting a rather posh accent, and "Without the Party, the village will be like a bowl of loose sand".

The Party in question is not some "cool gig, up West" but the Chinese Communist Party in David Hare's 1975 play, which is based on American writer William Hinton's book Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village — an account of how land reform was implemented in the village of Long Bow in China.

Hinton worked with the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in 1947. He remained there working as a tractor technician and teacher until 1953. In Long Bow, northern China, he witnessed first-hand the Chinese Revolution.

Not the stuff of West End theatre or of having the punters running up and down the aisles, you might think! However, director Roland Smith's energetic and well-paced production creates its own theatrical magic — a well-chosen and timely revival of Hare's often-forgotten piece.

Having the production staged in a crumbling space, behind The Property Merchant Group building in Regent Street, is truly subversive. The Property Group specialises in sustainable buildings for major occupiers and long-term investors. As Uncle Karl Marx might have said: "A contradiction!" A cast of 10 actors — twentysomething, with three women — played more than 30 different roles.

I would have preferred the actors to have employed a range of different dialects but I guess the idea was to show a uniformity which is easily identified in Chairman Mao's ÒcampÓ tunic surrounded by Party hacks with the same outfit.

The Utopian concept of the Peasants' Revolution and the "re-making" of people comes to a galloping standstill when the village eventually realises that it cannot eradicate greed, crime, power struggles and personal vanities.

It makes one almost feel sorry for Comrade Gordon Brown.
JOHN COURTNEY O'CONNOR, CAMDEN NEW JOURNAL


This is theatredelicatessen's second show in its requisitioned semi-derelict office space just off Oxford Circus. After a safe Shakespearean opener, here is something very different — a revival of David Hare's play about Chinese land reform during the '40s, when Chairman Mao tried to turn a feudal system into a communist utopia overnight, by redistributing land to the peasants.

The source material is William Hinton's book of the same title, an exhaustive study of the effects of revolution on one small village, Long Bow. Hare guts Hinton's book and turns it into a deft pastiche of Brecht's epic theatre. He shows how the idealistic aims of the party get bogged down by U-turns and reclassifications, while the endless meetings mean the peasants don't actually have time to tend their fields. But it's a mismatch of form and content. Brecht would never have tried to compress so much information into a single play, and still expect his audience to keep a handle on it all.

Nor is it as relevant as Delicatessen would have you think. A play about land reform in Zimbabwe? Yes, please. Or sweatshop labour in China? Again, yes. But this is a purely historical document, that tells us little useful about China today. A shame, because Roland Smith's production is clear-headed, and his young cast deserving of its applause — all in the service of a script that isn't quite worth it.
JONATHAN GIBBS, TIME OUT


theatredelicatessen has done a deal with the devil. Usually luvvies shun capitalists but Delicatessen has teamed up with an office developer in a scheme that enables the troupe to visit undead buildings and mount plays in their scooped-out innards prior to refurbishment. Wonderful plan. The derelict interior of 295 Regent Street makes a suitably ravaged setting for Fanshen, a David Hare play located in rural China in the 1940s, in which everyone wears clogs and rags and lives on two beanshoots a year.

The harrowing script focuses on the awakening of the peasants' political consciousness and traces the pathology of the revolution from the first heady and virulent outbursts of freedom, through the bitter struggles for influence and dominion, to the corrupt and paranoid backlash of the counter-revolution.

The play premiéred in 1975 and in those days playwrights were expected to tuck a Big Message, like a Christmas shilling, into their theatrical cake. And here it is: communism may look glamorous but it's dangerous, too, so if the glorious revolution starts in your factory think first before burning your overalls, snapping the conveyor belt in two, singing the 'Internationale' and shooting the foreman. That seems a bit obvious today (and it wasn't exactly news in 1975), but the play is a still a valuable and clear-headed piece of social history. [Roland] Smith's fine production is full of energetic performances and it finishes with a splendid visual flourish. A tough but rewarding night out.
LLOYD EVANS, THE SPECTATOR


Mao caps off and a long, long life to theatredelicatessen for bringing grass-roots land reform to 295 Regent Street in central London, which is in the heart of the Crown Estate. The audacious troupe have dusted off Fanshen, William Hinton's eyewitness account of upheaval in the remote village of Long Bow in China in the late 1940s and early '50s. But don't go looking for the revolution in a conventional theatre.

The stage is in a nondescript office block five minutes from Oxford Circus. To get to it, you have to go through a security door and down a strip-lit corridor, ending up in an indoor building site equipped with a few basic props.

The programme informs us, without a hint of irony, that it is "thanks to the generosity of the Property Merchant Group, one of London's leading commercial and mixed use development companies" that this is the venue.

The seating arrangement gives a taste of things to come. The audience is divided into red for rich peasant, yellow for middle peasant and green for poor peasant and all have to sit with their allocated class.

A man heaves a hoe while another hammers away at the anvil. A cockerel crows. Another misty day dawns on the plains of Shanxi province, but change is on its way. T'ien Ming (Pedro Reichert) leads a small Red Army detachment into the settlement, keen to mobilise the poorest in the community against the nationalist Kuomintang forces and the wealthy landlords who have sided with them. T'ien and his men strive to "sow the wind," calling on the ragged peasants to "discard superstition and study science," but, initially, it proves hard to spur them on, accustomed as they are to toiling in feudal servitude, meekly accepting their meagre lot.

Surely it is natural and god-ordained that we must toil endlessly on someone else's land and hand them the lion's share of the fruits for the privilege. Surely this is as natural as the dowry system and wife-beating.

But the communists patiently persist, asking the simple but ultimately revolutionary question, who is dependent on whom?

At first, only sturdy peasant woman Hsin-Ai and a few others realise that they can "turn the world upside down" if they stop submitting to the yoke. But, once the idea is planted, it is only a matter of discipline and organisation - and the communists have both in abundance.

Veteran playwright David Hare originally adapted Hinton's book for the stage in 1975, the year before the death of Mao. Hinton, a staunch Marxist until his own death in 2004, later claimed that that year marked the beginning of a "great reversal." Under Deng Xiaoping's subsequent "pragmatic" policy shift, the collective farm system which was established after the anti-feudal land reforms was largely broken up. While China's GDP per capita has grown dramatically since then, social inequality has too.

By portraying the complex dynamics of class struggle in the countryside in a resolutely realistic manner, Fanshen offers a vital insight into the making of the People's Republic of China and delivers a warning of fresh upheavals to come unless the Communist Party manages to narrow China's gaping urban-rural divide.
TOM MELLEN, THE MORNING STAR