Minh Nguyet’s play The Endless Field opened in February at the San Khau Nho Theatre, HCM City, to rave reviews. She adapted the play from a short story of the same name. She talks about her new work.

Why were you determined to adapt the short story to a play?

I found the short story interesting and original. When I finished reading it, my heart leapt; it felt like love at first sight. An idea to create a play like a film, which jumps between past and present, immediately popped into my head. I preferred the role of the prostitute whose life seems to be lost but who lives with many responsibilities and looks after Nuong and Dien. The two children suffer from the bad behaviour of their father, who is tortured by the unfaithfulness of his wife and lets them live on a junk and skip school. The children need the prostitute as a mother-figure. Through the play, I want adults to see how important it is to try and preserve their family’s happiness, so that their children can have a father and a mother and don’t have to suffer as much as Ut Vu’s children. Life cannot exist without love.

Many have said that the short story is too short and lacks the theatricality of a play. Did you have to modify or add things before you brought it to the stage?

You’re right. I called the story’s author, Nguyen Ngoc Tu, to ask if I could add some things of my own. She said okay. I then added and changed some details to make the story easier to accept for the audience.

In the short story, the wife cannot come back to her family after she betrays her husband. But in my play, she comes back to the family, overpowered by the thirst for her husband and nostalgia for her two children. I let the wife and the prostitute meet each other in my imagination. The two women hugged each other and cried: “Poverty has made us live a life that is not honest.”

The short story was set on an immense river. How did you bring this scenery to life in such a small theatre?

On the stage there is only a round platform. Sometimes it is an island or a river and sometimes a place for Ut Vu to rest when he feels happy or when he wants to go on his junk. The junk is a symbol of the fate of Nuong’s family, always floating. It is broken up due to the anger of the father and then fixed by the hands of the prostitute. The landscape of immense waterways is brought to the audience thanks to the use of a slide machine. The machine gives the impression [the audience] is sitting on the floating junk, and drifting with the characters’ fate.

What do you think about the ability of the actors? Do they convey the things you wanted to express in the play?

Twenty years after the play Song Dai (The Long River), Khanh Hoang and Thanh Thuy have remained an excellent pair. Khanh Hoang plays the role of Ut Vu incredibly well. Outside he is a rough man, but inside he has a fragile heart. Thanh Thuy plays the role of a woman at the bottom of society, but she stays optimistic and is full of love for the people around her. After Thuy read the scene, she told me she would like to play the prostitute and if she couldn’t play the role well, she would abandon the job. Finally, she played it marvellously.

Cat Phuong plays two roles – Nuong and her mother. The two roles have two different characters, but she did a very good job.

VietNamNet/VNS