Play «Hoa Cúc Xanh Trên Đầm Lầy» (Blue Chrysanthemums on the Swamp)

   Three childhood friends, a rejected proposal and two androids coded with nothing but humanity's finest qualities — this is Vietnamese theatre asking what artificial perfection costs, decades before the question turned everyday. If you want one evening in Hanoi that shows what Vietnamese drama of the 1980s was doing, start here.

   The title, “Blue Chrysanthemums on the Swamp”, is not decoration: a folk belief holds that whoever finds a blue chrysanthemum growing in a swamp will be granted the happiness they long for. Hoang, Lien and Van grow up beside that swamp. Le Hoang becomes a cybernetics engineer, Nguyen Van a painter, Thuy Lien a teacher. Turned down when he proposes to Lien, Hoang builds two androids in the image of Lien and Van, programmed with their best traits only. The “perfect copies” find no happiness in the world he made for them: they step into the real one and come face to face with their originals — people ground down by daily survival and by very ordinary flaws. From that collision the play asks what perfection is worth and what actually makes a person human, around a line that has outlasted its decade: “Happiness is what people truly long for most”.

   Luu Quang Vu (1948–1988) wrote close to 50 plays before he turned 40, and died in a car crash together with his wife, the poet Xuan Quynh, and their son; the Ho Chi Minh Prize was awarded to him posthumously in 2000. Of everything he wrote, this is his only script built on science fiction, and its title echoes Xuan Quynh's own poem “Hoa cúc xanh”: “Are there blue chrysanthemums, or are there none / in the swamp of your childhood”.

   The production running now is by Nguyen Si Tien, today the theatre's director. It opened in 2018 and took a Gold Medal at the National Drama Festival the same year, with sets by Doan Bang, music by Tuong Van, lighting by Xuan Khanh and movement by Mai Lan. For August the theatre lists Chi Huy, Thanh Son, Thu Quynh, Quynh Duong, Anh Tuan, Nguyet Hang, Tuan Anh, Ba Anh, Thanh Tu and Anh Tho — a cast that has to play both the living characters and their machine copies.

   Founded in 1978, Nha hat Tuoi tre is the only national art theatre in Vietnam created specifically for young audiences, and the Luu Quang Vu repertoire has long been its signature.

   The play runs 110 minutes and suits adults and older teenagers curious about the canon of Vietnamese spoken drama. August brings only two performances, and the same month the theatre also revives another Luu Quang Vu script, “Ông không phải là bố tôi” (1988), one of his last. Performances are in Vietnamese; the staging rests on a visual device — the living characters and their copies are told apart by costume — so the through-line stays followable once you know the outline above.

   Book a seat and decide which side of the swamp you would rather stand on.