LONDON — A new play on the arrest and detention of Chinese artist and political dissident Ai Weiwei had its world premiere at Hampstead Theatre last week. “#aiww: The Arrest of Ai Weiwei” is written by Howard Brenton and based on author BarnabyMartins’s interviews with the artist after his arrest in 2011, when he was detained for almost three months. The production, which is directed by James Macdonald, will run until May 18. ARTINFO UK had a chance to chat with Brenton to discuss the play, the artist, and the importance of the hash tag.
Do you think the play could pose a threat to Ai Weiwei’s safety?
It was Ai Weiwei’s idea. I was very aware that it’s not dangerous for me to write the play, but it could be very dangerous for him to have the play written. But it was his choice. He wanted it.
How did the play come about?
Barnaby interviewed Ai Weiwei very soon after he came out of jail in 2011 and at the end of the long interview in which he described everything that had happened to him in prison, he said to Barnaby, “I’d like this to be made into a play.” Barnaby sent the manuscript of his book (“Hanging Man: The Arrest of Ai Weiwei”) to the Hampstead Theatre and they hired me to write the play.
What do you think the play reveals about the artist?
He has a huge strength of character. A strange thing happened with the interrogators. It was almost like Stockholm Syndrome [when hostages sympathize with their captors] in reverse. The interrogators became sympathetic towards him. He even ended up discussing art and they even went on the net to find out about Dada and Marcel Duchamp and began to discuss art with them. The first set of interrogators was withdrawn because the interrogation disintegrated. Indeed, they ended up arguing about how to make Beijing noodles with him. The old saying “you couldn’t make it up” certainly applies to this material.
And about the Chinese system?
As for the system, it shows that it’s unstable and in a way, incoherent. Orders from the top are not liked at the bottom level. The police didn’t really like interrogating him. They were bored by it. They didn’t really understand why they had to do it. They were murder policemen, the first interrogators. And they even asked Ai Weiwei who he may have killed, assuming he was a murderer being thrown into their system. It’s both authoritarian and chaotic. I’m not saying it’s not dangerous and horrible — because it is — but it’s also chaotic. At the top level, it’s a very sophisticated government. It’s just very crude down on the ground.
The fight for freedom of expression isn’t a new battle for artists. What makes Ai Weiwei’s so intriguing and relevant?
His drive for freedom of speech and free expression is a very simple demand. Just simply to be able to speak.... It’s this simple, almost naive drive, and it comes from this Zen feeling of “I will speak.”
What’s the significance of the hash tag in the title?
He used to blog, but his blog was closed down by the authorities in 2009, and since then he’s been tweeting (there’s a tweeting system in China) and the authorities find it very hard to stop. So he uses it a lot. He tweets all the time and will refer you to what he’s doing, articles that interest him, and send out news about himself. Just put the hash tag in and you can read what he’s up to. So it seemed a very good title.
How much of Barnaby Martin’s material did you incorporate into the play?
I just concentrated on the account of the interview in the book. I set myself some strict rules with Barnaby’s material in that I would only include actual lines said, straight quotations from Ai Weiwei. Even when I made lines up, there’d relate directly to content in Barnaby’s account.
Are there any scenes in the play that aren’t mentioned in the book?
I took the decision to write two scenes of my own invention which are debates between two high officials in Beijing in the government compound about what to do about Ai Weiwei’s imprisonment and how it’s going because he was caught in a power struggle at a high level in the Chinese government, [a fact] which accounted for some strange things in the interviews. They were disorderly. The interrogations didn’t involve him being beaten up, which was unusual, and he was suddenly released. And there was a reason behind that which I tried to get at in the play.
Why did you feel the play needed those scenes?
Barnaby introduced me to a journalist, a very distinguished commentator on Chinese politics, Jeremy Page, who writes for the Wall Street Journal and lives in Beijing and is a mandarin speaker. He said he’d done a lot of thinking about how the Chinese leadership thinks and that was a very useful conversation.
“#aiww: The Arrest of Ai Weiwei,” until May 18, Hampstead Theatre, London