Theatre review: Minimalist adaptation of Lao She’s Rickshaw Boy

Rickshaw Boy

Beijing Artists Management Corp
Esplanade Theatre
Feb 7, 7.30pm

Chinese writer Lao She’s sweeping novel of misfortunes, which follows a country boy’s move to Beijing in the 1920s and his obstinate ambition of owning a rickshaw, is pared down in director Fang Xu’s minimalist adaptation.

Fang has distilled the play into a character study of the pitiable and unlucky Xiangzi, whose name ironically means “auspicious lad”. The young boy’s single-mindedness and naivete about the value of hard work, thriftiness and do-goodery only weds him to his poverty while others move up by trickery and theft.

Fang’s all-male cast of 15 might appear anything but minimalist. Yet, more than half the cast double as other characters, switching elegantly from their bedraggled grey puller uniforms into colourful garb from Republican-era China through graceful one-move costume reveals.

The raucous streets of Beiping – the old name for the capital – screeches to life through this lean and modular cast.

As soon as Xiangzi purchases his first rickshaw, he loses it to warlord soldiers who confiscate it. This cycle of brief fortune and attendant misfortune becomes a pattern and the audience soon learns to expect it from the boy’s recursive bildungsroman.

When a tigress woman (Zhao Zhen) offers to be his sugar mummy, self-sufficient Xiangzi sticks instead to his rickshaw pipe dream.

This motif of cyclical growth is echoed through the tasteful and spare set design that is dominated by circles – wheels, moon gates and round windows are suggested through light projection.

The 15 rickshaws suspended above the set read like the men’s unreachable ambitions or the swords of Damocles, threatening to upend their dream of social mobility.

Throughout young Xiangzi’s quest to rise from a wretched labourer to join the rickshaw-owning capitalist class, an older Xiangzi (acted by Fang) sits in a corner, offering bitter hindsight. This device enhances the psychological characterisation of the naive hustler.

The result is a lively distillation of Lao She’s novel. There is little to yawn at in this almost three-hour affair set in a distant era, although the high-handed morality of its ending – exacerbated by a penchant for monologue – belabours the point gleaned from early in the play.

Xiangzi is played by three actors: Xu Xingbo (who plays the young one), Ma Xike (middle-aged) and Fang (old). The choice to differentiate young and middle-aged Xiangzi comes across as unnecessary – although all actors embody the guilelessness of the protagonist convincingly.

There is something of Chinese opera or Shakespeare in Fang’s choice to cast men as all the characters, including the women. What it does is to foreground the homosocial environment that Xiangzi grows up in, emphasising how his idea of success and status is also shaped by his masculinist environment.

Lao She’s 1937 novel, through Fang’s adaptation, has much to say about contemporary economic malaises. Today’s tangping – Chinese internet slang for the rejection of societal pressure to work hard – generation might come to criticise Xiangzi more vigorously, yet the precarity of the modern gig economy also creates many Xiangzis.

His naive idealism about economic mobility, then, is both what modern audiences repudiate – but also, ironically, have no choice but to embrace.