Horror play «Bí Mật Một Lời Nguyền» (The Secret of a Curse)

   Five years ago a student climbed to the roof of an old lecture block, wrote a curse on the wall in her own blood and stepped off. Nobody knows exactly what those words said, only that strange things have been happening on that campus ever since. A new supernatural story from a Saigon stage starts at exactly that spot, and you get to untangle it alongside the characters.

   The setup is thoroughly contemporary. Khoa, a TikToker who films videos about the occult, stumbles on a rumour that has been circulating at a university for five years, goes up to the roof and starts a livestream that spreads across social media within hours. Hundreds of curious people decide to test the legend in person. Among them is Nam, Khoa's closest friend and a committed sceptic, convinced the whole thing is student hearsay inflated by the internet. On that same roof he meets a girl, falls for her, and gradually becomes part of a story he can no longer step out of. By the end the truth behind the curse turns out to be more frightening than the curse itself, and the meeting on the roof was probably no accident.

   The play is written by Lan Phương and directed by Lê Nguyễn Tuấn Anh, with People's Artist Hồng Vân as artistic adviser. Fourteen actors share the stage, among them Sỹ Lâm, Công Bùi, Yến Phi and Phạm Minh Đức.

   The company grew out of Sân khấu kịch Phú Nhuận, the stage that began Hồng Vân's whole theatre system, and now plays in the hall of Nhà văn hóa Sinh viên on Điện Biên Phủ. Horror is its home genre: five of the seven September evenings on the venue's own calendar are marked kinh dị, usually crossed with comedy or psychological drama.

   Go if you enjoy ghost stories told with everyday humour, or if you want to see Vietnamese spoken drama the way local audiences watch it, reacting out loud and all at once. For anyone collecting Vietnamese urban legends, this is campus folklore put on stage.

   Two practical notes. This production has a single performance on the schedule, and the online allocation at the ticket platform had already sold out by the time this listing was prepared; whatever seats remain are held by the theatre box office. The play runs in Vietnamese, and while the fear is built with light, sound and set design, every twist sits in the dialogue.

   Come for the feeling that makes you leave the hallway light on after a good scary story.