Play «Giáng Hương – Sân khấu về khuya» (The Stage After Midnight)

   Thành Lộc — an actor everyone in Vietnam knows — has put together his own company. What it brings to the stage first is «Giáng Hương»: not a new piece but a play more than sixty years old.

   It grew out of «Sau bóng hậu trường» — behind the scenes — which the same author later reworked for cải lương theatre as «Sân khấu về khuya», the stage after midnight. Several generations of actors have staged it, and the present title joins both versions as a tribute to the people who gave their lives to the theatre. This is spoken drama about theatre people, played by theatre people.

   Who is behind it:

   — written by Năm Châu, the People's Artist Nguyễn Thành Châu;
   — directed by Thành Lộc, Meritorious Artist;
   — music by Hữu Thu, choreography by Dương Nam Long;
   — cast including Lê Phương, Lương Thế Thành, Vân Trang, Hữu Châu, Kim Xuân and Thành Lộc himself — most of these names are familiar from film and television.

   Come if you want Vietnamese theatre outside the tourist version. A company's first production is always a statement; this one is made with an old play, and that says a good deal about where the theatre intends to go.

   On tickets: sold through ticketbox, priced by sector, with the lowest tier from 300,000 VND. The same play runs on all four evenings; there is no day-by-day programme. It is performed in Vietnamese and no surtitles or translation have been announced — without the language much will pass you by, though the performances and the staging read on their own.

   The theatre sits downtown, a fifteen-minute walk from Bến Thành market, so the evening fits easily around a walk in the centre.

   Four evenings, a sixty-year-old play and a company that begins with it. If you are in Ho Chi Minh City on those days, it is worth seeing.