Everyone has a dream
Bubbling away, churning up great anxiety
In the past century
women on stage and women off stage
are one and the same
The performance is conceived from two radical acts of reimagination: Xu Fen’s chuanju (Sichuan opera) Lady Macbeth, created and performed by Tian Mansha, and three poems by Zhai Yongming — Lady Macbeth — To Tian Mansha, The Three Witches, and Who Knocks at the Door.
Reincarnated from Shakespeare’s classic tragedy Macbeth, this Lady Macbeth belongs to no one but herself. Tian Mansha’s chuanju portrayal inspires poet Zhai Yongming to reclaim the story through verse and a woman’s unblinking gaze — ambition and desire, struggle and dread — peeling back the seduction of power to expose the abyss of human nature beneath. Wu Na summons the percussive heartbeat of traditional opera through the ancient instrument guqin, improvising a living score across the entire performance — breathing in tandem with Lady Macbeth’s dramatic presence and the shifting depths of the poetry. Tian Mansha inhabits a threefold identity — a figure caught within a play-within-a-play, creator, and performer — sculpting anew the labyrinthine psychology of Lady Macbeth.
At the opening and close, the three artists shed their roles and become the Three Witches — forging a new historical narrative that prophesies and mirrors the human condition of our time.
Mathias Woo responds to these themes through stage installation, sound, and image. In the art-and-technology theatre he constructs, the boundary between good and evil shimmers like the border of light and shadow upon human nature itself — where brightness and darkness interweave, as fleeting as the instant between life and death.
Zhai Yongming
Xu Fen
Tian Mansha
Mathias Woo
Wu Na
Cedric Chan
Zhai YongmingTian ManshaWu Na
In 2004, experimental chuanju (Sichuan opera) artist Tian Mansha teamed up with Xu Fen, the first female playwright in Chinese xiqu history, to reimagine Shakespeare’s classic works in the form of traditional chuanju. Their collaboration, where one performed and the other wrote the adaptation, breathed life into Lady Macbeth — depicted as a controversial, conflicted woman driven by desire and ambition, and created a contemporary drama, transcending cultural boundaries between East and West. The poet Zhai Yongming was deeply inspired by their performance and composed the poem Lady Macbeth —- To Tian Mansha, creating a dialogue between poetry and theatre.
Lady Macbeth — To Tian Mansha is regarded as a significant representative work that reflects Zhai Yongming’s maturation in feminist poetics. The poem is included in the Zhai Yongming Poetry Collection: Gray Lantern, published by a French women’s press in 2021. In the poem, Zhai navigates the interplay between text and stage, character and reality, posing dual questions: How would the lens of “tragic femininity,” reinterpreted by female artists, reshape our view of the world, and how do the historical and contemporary perspectives converge? Furthermore, what shared destiny beyond time is reflected in the gaze of women spectators? One notable line—“Women of the last century and women of this century are not different”—captures an essential cyclical truth inherent in female existence with its succinct potency.
Tickets available on ZUNI TICKETING & URBTIX platform.
Standard：$480
Local Full-time Student：$120
Joy 60+ (New Middle Aged 60 or above): $240
Golden 80+ (Senior Citizens Aged 80 or above): $10
People with disabilities and their minder: $240
Comprehensive Social Security Assistance Recipients (CSSA): $10#
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Recommended for ages 6 and above.
Performed in Mandarin.
Chinese and English surtitles provided.
Running time approximately 70 minutes, with no intermidsion included.
No latecomers will be admitted, until a suitable break in the performance.
Zuni Icosahedron reserves the right to add, withdraw or substitute artists, vary advertised programmes, and/or terminate the programme without prior notice.
