Teahouse

An old teahouse in Beijing stays exactly where it is for the better part of fifty years. The film opens in the last days of the Qing, passes through the warlord era, and ends on the eve of the People's Republic. The room never changes; what happens to the country is read entirely off the people at the tables, the ones who are ruined, who vanish, who switch sides, who do not come back. It is adapted from Lao She's 1956 play, directed by Xie Tian, and performed by the Beijing People's Art Theatre company carrying their own stage roles onto film. Lao She never saw it. He died in 1966, in the first months of the Cultural Revolution. This remains the best known record of one of the most performed texts in Chinese theatre.