A Director’s Journey: Four Hundred Years of Dreaming

In late 2012 I found myself on a flight bound for China together with the cast of ‘The Sun is Not for Us’ renowned director David Jiang’s reworking of some of the stories involving the female characters from the father of Chinese spoken word drama Cao Yu. I was production manager for the tour, which travelled to three cities and also operating sound. This was my first trip to China, in fact it was my first trip to Asia and the experience was, perhaps unsurprisingly, overwhelming. I started to fall in love with China and all its complexities, contradictions and culture. It was the joint realisation that I not only wanted to find out more about my new found love of Chinese theatre but that I also wanted to share it with both UK and Chinese audiences that eventually led me to board another plane in Sept 2016 bound for Shanghai, Beijing and Fuzhou to tour a new adaptation of Tang Xianzu’s ‘Nanke Ji’, but I’m getting ahead of myself…