Review by Rees Arnott-Davies.One anticipates when seeing a play in a foreign language (especially one so distant as Mandarin) that something is always going to be lost in translation. Unfortunately, this was very much proved to be the case by 'I Love Peach Blossom', a play seeming to offer so much, but unfortunately failing to deliver. Sitting in the audience watching the breakdown of not only a relationship, but also reality, I felt all too shackled by the prison-house of language.
This is not to say that 'I Love Peach Blossom' didn’t have its moments. In particular, the progression from comic to tragic is carried out practically without fault, adding to the dramatic effect. Furthermore, the blurring of the lines between the suffocating reality that engulfs the lives of the characters, and the impossible play that they are trying to stage, is ultimately successful. One gets a very real sense that fiction is, for the characters, the only reality that they can escape to when their lives have reached an impasse or they are close to collapsing about their heads. And it is this sense of a deferring of the inevitability of the passage of life, which raises the play up, which makes believable what one might otherwise consider too simplistic or two-dimensional.Unfortunately, these moments of excellence are undermined by more material problems. The fact that the play is translated for the audience on a screen behind the actual stage can, at its best, lead to unintentional Brechtian moments of alienation, and at its worst lead to an entire breakdown in the dramatic project. I will not go into specifics, but needless to say, it is inadvisable to place the concluding revelation on the play slap-bang in the middle of the stage before the final scene has even started. Equally, the translation leaves more than a little to be desired, demeaning a script that might in the right hands have sparkled with vitality.
Nonetheless, one must always jump at the opportunity of experiencing a cultural production from outside one’s own social background, and if you were to take nothing at all away from seeing I Love Peach Blossom apart from the realisation that there is another side to theatre besides that approved by the Arts Council of Britain, it would still be worth it.
I Love Peach Blossom
