Daniel Nelson

A new play at the Arcola Theatre starts with Mao Zedong on the balcony above the throng in Tienanmen Square in 1949 and ends 66 years later with four Maos making speeches in Rotten Peach Village.

To know how and why this happens you will have to see The Sugar-Coated Bullets of the Bourgeoisie, and you'll have a good time if you do.

Anders Lustgarten's play is ambitiously subtitled The Formation of Modern China and he makes a good stab it - as you might expect from a writer who studied Chinese for almost a decade at Oxford and Berkeley and two years on and off in China ("The Chinese revolution is probably the greatest grassroots, bottom-up revolution in modern history") and, more importantly, has a rare gift for entertaining political theatre.

The first part sees the arrival in the village of a two-person communist party work team, a doctrinaire townie and a louse-eating peasant woman whose father was killed by the Nationalists. Their first job is to persuade the cowed villagers to break the centuries-old grip of the feudal landlord ("This is your world now"), which they do, violently.

Land reform, women's lib, education, new opportunities for the previously oppressed follow, in turn followed by the madnesses of the Great Leap Forward, the shift from community democracy to centralised diktat and the split between party and people, famine, the Cultural Revolution, the drive for production at all costs ("Overtake Russia in five years! Overtake Britain in 15 years!"). It's seen through the lives of a handful of villagers and its two party visitors: pacey, witty, scabrous, scatalogical ("This production contains: swearing")

But it's a game of two halves, and part two opens with selfies, flashing neon, strutting people. Modern, capitalist China has arrived complete with corruption and sweatshops. Meanwhile, back in Rotten Peach Village...

This is energetic, intelligent, gutsy, inventive theatre-making with a broad historic sweep. And it matters. As Lustgarten says, "Chinese economic demand was the only thing that bailed out our hapless failed elites after thge 2008 banking crisis, our universities are flooded with Chinese students, our cities with Chinese investors - and yet China remains the country we stubbornly refuse to understand." 

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Sugar-Coated Bullets of the Bourgeoisie

Sugar-Coated Bullets of the Bourgeoisie

Image by Arcola Theatre

 is at the Arcola Theatre, 24 Ashwin Street, E8, until 30 April. Info: 7503 1646/ boxoffice@arcolatheatre.com . It will play at the HighTide Festival in Aldeburgh, Suffolk, on 8-18 September 2016.

+ 19 April, post-show discussion with Ha-Joon Chang and Anders Lustgarten

 


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