When you first read the play, what moved you most? Was it a particular scene, a familiar situation from everyday life, or perhaps a very small detail?
What moved me most when I first read the play wasn’t any particular scene, but a sense of reality that felt very close to everyday life. The situations depicted in the text are simple and restrained, without any attempt to heighten the emotion, yet they gave me a powerful sense of life unfolding before my eyes.
I was particularly drawn to the mother’s voice. Rather than an emotional outpouring, it has a certain distance from what it describes, looking back on and recalling these fragments of everyday life. This slightly detached perspective offers the audience another way of understanding life.
When the text speaks, towards the end, of becoming “stronger, more dignified, and prouder,” I felt a particularly strong connection. It made me realise that the strength we never knew we possessed often emerges precisely when we face difficulties. It is by confronting life’s challenges, one after another, that we gradually come to understand ourselves and pass that strength and experience on to the next generation.
What made you decide to translate the play into Chinese and bring it to the stage? Did it resonate with something you were experiencing at that particular moment in your life?
I came across the play after the Chinese New Year last year, through a friend at the Cultural Department of the French Embassy with whom I have worked for many years. After reading it, I realised that what attracted me wasn’t simply the story of a mother and daughter, but the positive outlook it conveyed.
Over the past few years, all of us have, in one way or another, had to face unexpected challenges in our lives. Moments when, before they happen, we imagine that we are not yet prepared, or perhaps not even capable of enduring what lies ahead. But when life actually confronts us with these situations, we have no choice but to face them and find a way through. Looking back afterwards, we often discover that the difficulties which once seemed impossible to overcome were, in fact, overcome, step by step.
This experience resonated very strongly with what I felt when reading the play. It made me realise that the work is not really about suffering or vulnerability, but about the strength that emerges in difficult circumstances, and the conviction that, whatever happens, daylight will eventually come.
That is precisely why I wanted to share this strength with audiences through a Chinese translation and a stage production. Presenting it as our company’s first production of the new year, just before the Chinese New Year, also had a very particular and genuine significance for me.
During rehearsals, was there a scene or a moment that turned out completely differently from what you had imagined when you first read the play? Could you share some of the discoveries that emerged from working with the actors?
This production was quite unusual for me because, when I first read the play, I had almost no specific images in mind. As a reader and as the Chinese translator, I initially experienced the text through its words, through a feeling or a particular state of being, rather than through any clear visual imagination. I realised quite early on that it was only after completing the translation, and through the collaborative work with the actors, that the production would begin to develop its own stage imagery.
So many of the scenes only gradually took shape during rehearsals. We took these fragments of everyday life, which appear in the text almost like fragments of memory, and slowly brought them back into bodies, time, and relationships. One question that I kept discussing with the actors was how to make the audience feel that what they were watching was not a single day or a single moment, but many years of living together. Time itself became a very important element on stage.
Some of the most interesting discoveries came from exploring the body. I particularly wanted to introduce dance into the rehearsals, and at certain moments even move towards something close to musical theatre. For me, dance is a very free, very primal form of physical expression. It can express moments of intimacy and shared experience, but it can also bring genuine joy and vitality. It was through this constant process of dancing that many emotions and relationships, which had initially been difficult to define in words, gradually found their place on stage.
Another important discovery came during the first stage of rehearsals, when we found a way of making the daughter truly present on stage. The young actress Chen Jiyi, who plays the daughter, spends much of the rehearsal and performance inside the daughter’s bedroom. But she is not waiting for her next entrance or taking a break. She remains in a continuous state of performance.
Through the camera she holds, she seems to be watching her mother through her own eyes. For much of the performance, the audience cannot see her body directly, yet she is always there. In this way, the daughter remains continuously present, while the mother is seen again through another perspective: her daughter’s.
Multimedia images play an important role in the production. What led you to use them? Do they function more as documentation, as memories, or as a way of revealing things and perspectives that cannot otherwise be seen on stage?
I have always been very cautious about using multimedia images in theatre.
For me, video should never be decorative or simply a display of technology. It has to be an artistic choice that is genuinely necessary to the creation.
In this production, the most immediate reason for using video came from the structure of the text itself. The daughter grows from a little girl of just over three years old into a university student. That is an enormous span of time. If we relied entirely on the actors’ performances, it would be difficult to make the audience truly believe in that process of growing up, both visually and emotionally.
How could we make the daughter genuinely present on stage? In the end, I decided to use live video as the daughter’s eyes, allowing us to observe the mother through her perspective.
We are accustomed to looking at children from the parents’ point of view, but we rarely reverse the question: What do parents look like through their children’s eyes? When are they happy? When are they sad? When are they anxious, or relaxed?
In that sense, multimedia images are neither simply a form of documentation nor merely an extension of memory. They introduce a perspective that cannot be conveyed directly through performance alone. They allow the daughter to be “seen” on stage, while also inviting the audience to look through the child’s eyes and rediscover the mother from another point of view.
The set recreates a very recognisable domestic environment, with a sofa, a bed, a table, and so on. You have also created a separate children’s bedroom. What was the thinking behind this design?
We chose to create a very realistic domestic environment because the play itself is an act of remembering everyday life. Through the voice-over, the audience is taken back through the long years of the daughter’s childhood and adolescence. And memories are often brought back to us through very concrete objects.
Among these spaces, we created a separate children’s bedroom. During the years when a child is not yet independent and still needs care and protection, the bedroom is almost the centre of the home, its most fortress-like space. A fortress that has been built with so much effort.
On stage, this space is both real and incomplete. It has no fully constructed walls, only a few pieces of furniture and some Venetian blinds. Like memory itself, it is made up of things that are clear and things that remain blurred.
And among all our memories, the children’s bedroom is often one of the clearest and most tangible spaces. The photographs, drawings, toys, and books hold within them years of shared life.
As for what happens to the bedroom at the end of the performance, that transformation carries an important part of the play’s meaning. I would rather leave that for the audience to experience for themselves in the theatre.
The play doesn’t rely on strong dramatic conflicts or highly theatrical events. Instead, it moves from one fragment of everyday life to another. What are the challenges of rehearsing this kind of text? Were you concerned that audiences might find it too uneventful?
To be frank, from the beginning of rehearsals until now, even after our first weekend of performances, I still worry that audiences might not be accustomed to a structure without strong dramatic conflict. Its rhythm and narrative form are very different from those of conventional theatre.
But at the same time, I know very clearly that this is exactly what the work needs to be. It cannot, and should not, be forced into a more dramatic form with stronger conflicts. It was precisely this truthful, simple, unembellished, apparently quiet quality that attracted me in the first place.
And that is where the difficulty of rehearsing it lies.
Without clearly defined dramatic conflicts, the actors have to build a sense of the passage of time, a kind of depth accumulated through the years. How much time has passed between one scene and the next? What else has happened during those years? All the gaps that are neither written nor explained in the text have to be fully imagined and made concrete during rehearsals.
Only when these gaps have become real, firmly established memories within the actors can these seemingly ordinary fragments of life truly exist on stage, allowing the audience to experience an emotional movement within the stillness.
Like a drop of water falling into a calm lake and sending ripples across its surface.
You have emphasised that this play is not only about “mothers.” What broader questions do you think it touches upon? Beyond the mother-daughter relationship, what kind of relationship or state of being would you most like the audience to pay attention to?
Of course, the play is about the years a mother and daughter spend together, accompanying one another as they grow. But it does not stop at the mother-daughter relationship.
For me, it touches on a much more universal experience of life, something that any of us may encounter at some point: a moment when life suddenly changes, when we find ourselves having to readjust, to face the world differently, and to find a way to keep moving forward.
You once said that the play does not attempt to provide answers, but instead accompanies the audience in a state where things remain unresolved. What does this sense of “companionship” in theatre mean to you?
It means that even when there are no answers, theatre can still accompany you as you remain curious, continue thinking, continue longing for things, and continue hoping.
The same play is also being rehearsed in France. Are you curious about which moments might move audiences in another cultural context? Or do you believe that what the play expresses is universal?
Rather than imagining which particular details might move audiences in another culture, I am more interested in approaching the question from the opposite direction.
Can a play that comes from another cultural context, a story written by a creator from another country, still feel true within our own lives?
For me, the more important thing is to explore whether, through translation and through theatre, a work created somewhere far away can still be genuinely felt by audiences here. Can it resonate with our cultural context and our lived experiences?
If it can still create an emotional connection, allowing us to feel, to think, to question things together, and perhaps even discover something new, then I believe it is touching on something universal.
If the audience were to leave the theatre remembering only one sentence or one feeling, what would you hope it would be?
« Les nuits font désormais place aux jours. »
The nights now give way to the days.