Play «Già Gân» (Tough Old Man)

   A cheap rented block down an alley, where everything is overheard and repeated wrong — a setting anyone who has lived in a working-class quarter of Saigon recognises immediately. The play opens on the neighbours' misunderstandings, played for laughs, then turns into something else entirely: a story about a father and a son.

   It is written and directed by Đinh Mạnh Phúc, with People's Artist Hồng Vân as artistic adviser, Lê Tuấn Anh producing and sets by Trần Đông and Văn Xin. The cast is drawn from the theatre's regular company, Hồng Vân and Đinh Mạnh Phúc among them.

   The core of the story belongs to Mr Tài, a labourer convicted of murder who served 15 years in prison to pay for his son's heart surgery and his future. Released, he cannot bring himself to claim the boy: he stands outside the glass front of his son's office and watches. The son, now successful, fears public opinion more than he fears losing his father — and the truth arrives too late to help either of them.

   This is the kind of production where an audience laughs for most of the evening and then goes quiet in the last scene. The play is in Vietnamese and carried by dialogue, much of it in southern idiom, so it rewards a companion who can translate. Tickets are sold through Ticketbox.