For most performers, the biggest fear about staging a new play is that no one will come. Or that an actor might forget lines. For Kuo Chia-yo (郭家佑), an activist, artist and diplomat, her biggest fear was that someone might shoot the cast.
“During rehearsals, I was so stressed out that I often dreamt that someone would get up from the audience and fire a gun while we were on the stage,” Kuo said.
Considering the subject-matter of her play, Kuo’s nightmares do not seem so far-fetched.
Photo courtesy of the National Theater and Concert Hall via CNA
Written by Swiss and Taiwanese creators and produced in Switzerland, This Is Not An Embassy deals with Taiwan’s lack of global recognition as a country and the diplomatic challenges it faces as a result.
In service of its aim to influence or coerce the small democracy, the Chinese government has engaged in civil and military campaigns against Taiwan, and well-organized public and private intimidation of dissidents.
“The play will tour around the world, and if any Chinese delegates are not happy to see it, I hope that all the aggression will only be directed towards me, and will not be extended to my family,” Kuo said.
The play imagines three different Taiwanese characters: a retired ambassador, an international organization worker and a musician from a boba tea merchant family. They debate Taiwan’s withdrawal from the UN in 1971, the controversy over the dictator and military commander Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), and the mixed feelings about Taiwan’s official name, the Republic of China (ROC), and “Chinese Taipei,” a name it must use to compete in the Olympics. Signs reading “Agree” or “Disagree” are held up during the play to show the difference in Taiwanese opinions.
With tickets selling out when it was staged in Taipei, This Is Not An Embassy is to tour again through Europe from this month, despite attempts by the Chinese government to shut it down.
After being performed in Taiwan, the play was praised for representing different voices in Taiwan and showing diverse opinions toward China, the country where many — but not all — Taiwanese people originate, but which is intensifying threats to upend Taiwanese’s way of life.
China brooks no such nuance. In June, Beijing threatened to impose the death penalty for those it considered to be “die-hard” Taiwanese independence separatists.
In response, President William Lai (賴清德) said China has no power to sanction the people of Taiwan.
“Democracy is not a crime, autocracy is a sin,” he said.
Therefore, it is not surprising that This Is Not an Embassy has also been targeted by pro-China forces.
The production team told The Guardian that ahead of the last tour, Chinese authorities had called the Swiss Department of Foreign Affairs and other municipal officials to express concern about the play being staged in the host theater, in Vidy-Lausanne.
The director said that the Swiss ministry assured the production team that “we have freedom of artistic expression in this country. Nobody is in charge of censorship here.”
The Swiss ministry did not respond to requests for comment.
Theater is relatively low profile and a basic commitment to liberal values in the theater world might have helped their cause, the creators suggest.
“I think we have been granted a certain kind of exemption” [from China’s pressure], coproducer Mu Chin (穆芹) said.
However some theaters and festivals in Singapore, Japan and New Zealand have refused to stage This Is Not An Embassy because, “they feel too much pressure,” Kuo said.
At the end of last year, a presentation in a museum at a festival in Munich, Germany, was canceled without a clear explanation.
“They canceled it a few weeks before. We don’t even know what exactly happened, but you get paranoid. I guess somebody called. They never called us though. At the beginning, I was afraid that somebody might run on stage and harm us. We thought they would probably do something to interrupt one of the shows, but none of this happened,” said Stefan Kaegi, the play’s Swiss-German director.
Kaegi has a decade-long relationship with Taiwan. The idea for the play came after he noticed that Switzerland did not have an embassy in Taipei. He wanted to find out what the de facto embassy in Taiwan was all about and was curious about Taiwan’s international status.
The play’s first run in Europe was this year.
The morning of the first open rehearsal in the Lausanne theater, Nauru cut its ties with Taiwan and established diplomatic relations with China, just days after Taiwan elected Lai, who Beijing detests.
The news was familiar to Taiwanese. Since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, ruled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in Beijing, almost every country in the world has formed diplomatic ties with it instead of Taiwan. Today, Taiwan has only 12 diplomatic allies left.
The country has enjoyed de facto independence since the defeated ROC fled there at the end of its civil war with the CCP.
Living in Europe, it is easy to take basic freedoms for granted, Kaegi said.
“We are used to criticizing a lot of problems of democracy,” he said. “When you come from Shanghai to Taipei, you really feel all over the city that the creativity comes out of a society that has conflict within itself and openly talks and deals with the conflict, and allows others to criticize.”
However, despite Taiwanese’s rowdy and proud celebrations of democracy, the constant pressure from China, including military exercises, still causes anxiety.
“China has left Taiwan with a high degree of uncertainty about the future. There is a feeling that the future is not 100 percent in our hands,” Kuo said.
In the final show in Taipei in April, the audience clapped and cheered as the crew placed a gleaming gold plaque on the stage reading: “Embassy of the Republic of China (Taiwan)” on it.
People all over the world take their embassies for granted. Here, for two hours in a theater in Taipei, Taiwanese people had their diplomatic aspirations fulfilled as well.
This Is Not An Embassy shows at the Zurcher Theater Spektakel in Zurich, Switzerland, from Aug. 29 to 31, before touring to Madrid; Rotterdam, the Netherlands; Seoul; Prague; and Paris, Valenciennes and Nantes in France.
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