Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture

Comments on the Finalist

Even though it is a small production, but the director interprets Harold Pinter’s language in a radical fashion, turning the theater into the first scene of the event, and the audience accomplices, or witnesses of how the event takes place. As scenes of “violence” and “suppression” unfold in front of their eyes, Taiwan’s theater regains the strength it should have had. (Written by LIN Yu-Pin)

Artwork Introduction

Mountain Language by major British playwright Harold Pinter was inspired by a visit to Turkey in 1985, where Pinter witnessed how the Kurdish languages have been oppressed by the government. After the play was premiered in 1988, this twenty-minute piece was described as an instant, cold-hearted, and utterly obliterating atomic bomb in a British review. A script with so few pages that it might be lost at any possible moment, how much power does it have that it could “bomb” this world?

Delving into Taiwan’s current social environment, CHEN Shih-Ying’s adaptation of Mountain Language for the “2013 Young Stars New Vision-Theater I” portrays a range of inequality, intolerance, incomprehension, and violence due to “position”—even in a so-called free country, do we really enjoy the freedom to “choose”? When the plots become our surrounding reality, is there anyone who can really stand up and take action? Or will people simply choose to remain silent? The entire production puts the audience and performers in the same space. Apart from the tension between characters, the audience are unexpectedly turned into a major factor that the performers need to deal with at once. As the story unfolds, the subtle relationship between the audience and the performers, one that can switch at any given moment, becomes the biggest challenge as well as the most mesmerizing landscape in this work. 

About the Artist 

CHEN Shih-Ying grew up in Taipei. She holds an MFA in Directing from Taipei National University of the Arts. Her recent works include Put Down Roots at Thirty, which was presented at 1^st Beijing, Hong Kong and Taiwan Youth Theater Festival in 2013. She is also the director of Mary & Marlin．Johnny & Jonathan presented at the “2012 Young Stars New Vision.”