Le Van Dinh believes that happiness is everything

Religion twice played a brief but crucial role in the formative years of a leading stage designer.

One day when he was ten years old, Dinh looked at a painting of the Buddha and wondered: “Who draws the Buddha so badly? When I grow up, I’ll do a far more beautiful job.”

He soon forgot about his spur-of-the-moment pledge, but those words would turn out to be somewhat prophetic.

A few years later, Dinh showed his home gallery brimming with paintings and lifelike clay animals to a Catholic priest, who was amazed by the young artist’s work.

The priest advised him to take the entrance exam for Saigon Fine Arts University, and the young man took the fatherly advice.

Dinh would later give some of his paintings to pagodas and churches as a token of his gratitude for nurturing his artistic flair.

He worked his way through university by decorating the traditional tunics known as ao dai for a tailor’s shop.

The wife of the Saigon regime’s president Nguyen Van Thieu liked his art so much that she asked him to decorate her ao dais with unique pictures and patterns.

He was paid 50 dong a week at a time when 300 dong was nearly enough to buy a car. But he didn’t buy a car.

“I’m an artist. I didn’t know much about life except my work, so I’ve always been poor,” said Dinh, who was born in 1951.

After the war finished in 1975, he was posted to several schools before being appointed to teach stage design at the Ho Chi Minh City College of Stage and Cinema.

He disliked the job at first, feeling that his quiet voice and slight build were not conducive to lecturing, and felt like an outsider.

Catharsis came a few years later after some harmless light banter from his colleagues, who often poked fun at Dinh.

Outraged, he boasted with as much zeal as he had felt years ago in the pagoda: “I’ll change the face of stage design within a few years!”

Since then Dinh has become one of the city’s leading stage designers, and for the past ten years has headed the artistic design and make-up department of the Stage and Cinema College.

Dinh created quite a stir at his school in 1980 when he designed the set for Me Dam va bay con (Mother courage and her children, or Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder in the original German), a play written in 1939 by the German dramatist and poet Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956).

His controversial set consisted of newspaper and nothing else. It was without precedent.

Considered by some to be the greatest play of the 20th century and perhaps the greatest antiwar play of all time, Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder was the first play by Brecht ever to be staged in HCMC.

Dinh’s elegant and intimate stage designs are perfect for cozy venues like the French culture center Idecaf and the tiny theater at 5B Vo Van Tan Street.

Over the past 30 years, Dinh has designed the sets for more than 300 plays, the most notable being Tinh yeu danh cho hai nguoi (Love for two people), Chuyen van chuong (Literary affairs), Bi mat vuon Le Chi (Secrets of Le Chi Garden), Tieng chim vuon ngoc lan (Twitter in the orchid garden) and Con cao va chum nho (The Fox and the Grapes).

Besides designing, Dinh gives talks on his profession and is planning to write a book about designing mobile sets that can be dismantled and reassembled easily.

He doesn’t own a place of his own. Instead, he and his family rent an apartment at the college.

“I have some money put aside, but not enough to buy a house. It’s just enough to buy motorbikes and go traveling, two things I do often. Life’s great if we are happy.”

He twice declined the offer of a government house, on one occasion letting a friend who had just got married have the house instead.

His sympathetic and loving wife, Nguyen Thi Vien, was his classmate at college and went on to lecture there after graduating.

In the early years of their marriage, Vien was offered several scholarships to study in the Soviet Union and Poland, but she declined as she didn’t want to be far away from her husband.

Eventually she quit her teaching job so that she could help Dinh concentrate on his career.

These days Vien works part-time from home and advises her husband on his stage designs.

“My wife gives so much of herself to my career,” Dinh said.

Reported by Hoang Kim