English becomes a Chinese puzzle

• Source: Global Times
• [09:46 August 24 2010]
• Comments

A scene from Sleuth. Photo: Courtesy of Shanghai Drama Art Center

By Guo Song

A successful English writer meets an English hairdresser in a cottage in southern England. The theme is revenge. The characters are very English. The setting is very English. But nevertheless this stereotypical English play will come alive on Shanghai's stage, presented by a troupe of Chinese actors. How will the Chinese become English?

The world-famous thriller Sleuth will be staged at the Shanghai Drama Art Center from Thursday to September 5 in Chinese with English subtitles.

The 1970 play is playwright Anthony Shaffer's most famous piece. The story is set in the Wiltshire, a county in southwestern England. Successful mystery writer Andrew Wyke is living the outward life of a man who has everything.

He has money, fame and social status but he now has to face the fact that his wife has been unfaithful and their marriage is doomed. After careful planning, Wyke decides to meet his wife's lover, Milo Tindle, a good-looking but working-class hairdresser.

Wyke lures the young man to his isolated manor and convinces him to stage a robbery of his wife's jewelry. But the staged robbery is just part of a cat-and-mouse game and suddenly the jealous husband points a gun at the young man.

The play premiered in London in December 1970 and went to Broadway soon afterwards where it won a Tony Award for Best Play in 1971.

It ran for thousands of performances in productions all around the world. The play was adapted for the cinema in 1972 and again in 2007.

The 1972 Sleuth script was written by Anthony Shaffer himself, with Laurence Olivier playing Andrew Wyke and Michael Caine as Milo Tindle. The movie was nominated for four Oscars and three Golden Globe awards in 1973.

The screenplay of the 2007 Sleuth was written by the playwright and 2005 Nobel Laureate for Literature, Harold Pinter. In the later film version Michael Caine played the upper-class writer and the hairdresser was played by Jude Law.

Shaffer's original play is famous for its wit and wordplay. "The language used by the upper-class writer is very graceful and elegant, but the hairdresser has to try his best to speak well to disguise the fact that he is from the lower class," said the play's director, Lin Yi.