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OzAsia Theatre Review: Fight The Landlord

Cleverly staged in the round with the audience onstage and even at the card table with the actors, beautifully and humorously directed and performed, and highly profound while still being entertaining, this is exciting theatre


Fight-landlord-photo
Presented by Pan Pan Theatre  and the Adelaide Festival Centre
Reviewed 17 September 2013

Pan Pan Theatre and Beijing Square Moon Culture’s Fight The Landlord could easily be subtitled “Up extremely close and quite personal with card playing (and at times, Communist card-carrying) Pandas”. This well crafted production as directed by Gavin Quinn is wonderfully bizarre and fabulously theatrical.

Three performers, Sun Yue (also the writer of the piece), Wang Jinglei and Zhu Yutong, dressed as Pandas and play many rounds of a card game called “Fight The Landlord”: the relationships are unclear; the personas represented are varied; the issues covered are many – including celebrity gossip, property, power, beauty, dating, love, pay rises and 3D movies.

This absurdist comedy/drama/experience actually makes sense and tackles many modern issues that aren’t just pertinent to China, but to modern society as a whole. The only slight drawback to the understanding of the piece is that it requires that Devil’s invention, surtitles, to aid comprehension, thus causing the audience to switch their attention between a screen and the actors, missing many finely-tuned movements and inflections.

Cleverly staged in the round with the audience onstage and even at the card table with the actors, beautifully and humorously directed and performed, and highly profound while still being entertaining, this is exciting theatre that should not be missed – especially for its originality.

Reviewed by Brian Godfrey

Venue: Her Majesty’s Theatre, 58 Grote Street, Adelaide
Season: 17-18 September 2013
Duration: 1 hour (no interval)
Tickets: $32.00 – $40.00
Bookings: Book at BASS

 

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