CHINA: Chinese audiences gasped at Peking Pegeen Mike's micro-miniskirt and raised eyebrows at Christy Mahon's foolhardiness as they warmly welcomed the debut of The Playboy of the Western World in Mandarin with an all-Chinese cast in Beijing yesterday.
The capital's Oriental Theatre was full for the show, which was widely flagged in the Chinese media, and people here were definitely curious about this most Irish of plays, directed by Pan Pan theatre group.
Theatre-goers clearly enjoyed director Gavin Quinn's adaptation, using contemporary Beijing dialect and hardcore slang.
Audience members after the opening night felt that lifting Christy and Pegeen Mike out of their natural habitat in Co Mayo in the early years of the last century, and placing them in a hairdressing salon in the Beijing suburbs, was an inspired choice.
"I've never seen anything like this before. The theme is very interesting and the language was very clever," said one young woman, a Ms Zhang.
"The rhythm keeps you asking the question about what will happen next. You never get bored."
It's a well-paced, funny and very hip production and the mostly young audience was extremely enthusiastic. There were strong performances from Jun Ning Chen as Christy and La La as Pegeen Mike.
The audience particularly warmed to Bao Gang's crusty, menacing Old Mahon, who dressed like a Long March veteran.
Chinese audiences are used to Beijing Opera, where people come and go and it's not unusual to hear a mobile phone chirp away at plays. The audience at Playboy responded mostly well to requests to turn the mobiles off - quite an achievement in Beijing, where people won't do it on aircraft if they can help it.
The question was always going to be how would the thorny theme of parricide go down in China but most seemed to get the message. Many watching said they knew nothing of the play before but were now curious to see the Irish version.
Playboy, which runs until March 25th, is being jointly produced by Pan Pan, Beijing Oriental Pioneer Theatre and independent theatre producers Vallejo Ganter and Wang Zhaohui.
"I'm still a little bit high from the opening," Wang said. "The reaction was exactly what we hoped for. We were worried the audience might miss out on some of the finer points but they didn't - the script worked very well."
Despite the controversial subject matter and the shortness of the skirts, this correspondent can report there were no riots about indecent material or language, in contrast to the play's original reception in Dublin nearly 100 years ago.