What a Blue Daisy Can Bring to Contemporary Vietnamese Theatre: Translated Performances of Vietnamese Drama
Yuko Nobe*
Abstract
From around the 13th century, Vietnam’s principal form of opera was a musical theatre that relied heavily on melody and rhythm as its primary means of expression. In the late 19th century, during the French colonial period, a form of spoken drama influenced by Western theatre was introduced. Modern Vietnamese theatre (Kịch nói, or “spoken drama”) thus has a history of about one hundred years and has always been closely tied to ideology due to its historical context. In the late 1980s, the emergence of playwright Lưu Quang Vũ marked a period of remarkable creativity and renewal. Since the 2000s, however, rapid social changes in Vietnam have transformed the theatrical landscape, presenting new challenges—particularly in maintaining audience engagement. One potential response to these challenges lies in the internationalization of Vietnamese theatre. This paper examines how internationalization can contribute to the revitalization of contemporary Vietnamese Kịch nói by analyzing Lưu Quang Vũ’s 1987 play Hoa cúc xanh trên đầm lầy (Blue Daisy in the Swamp) and its 2018 revival by the Youth Theatre in Hanoi. It also discusses broader issues surrounding internationalization through a case study of the author’s own project translating and staging Blue Daisy in the Swamp in Japan.
Keywords: Vietnamese spoken drama, Lưu Quang Vũ, Blue Daisy in the Swamp, Japan-Vietnam intercultural theatre, researcher as practitioner
Introduction and Historical Foundations
The history of modern Vietnamese theatre provides a revealing lens through which to examine the intersections of cultural transformation, political ideology, and artistic innovation in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Vietnam. Among the various theatrical forms that developed over this period, kịch nói (spoken drama) occupies a particularly significant position. Emerging during the colonial era as an adaptation of Western dramatic conventions, kịch nói evolved into a primary medium for articulating national concerns, critiquing social realities, and negotiating tensions between tradition and modernity.
This article focuses on the work of Lưu Quang Vũ (1948–1988), whose plays in the 1980s captured the anxieties and aspirations of a society in transition. His dramaturgy was marked by allegory, symbolism, and a deep concern with human dignity under conditions of political stagnation and social change. Among his many works, Hoa Cúc Xanh Trên Đầm Lầy (Blue Daisy in the Swamp 1987) stands out for its innovative use of science fiction tropes, allegorical figures, and moral dilemmas.[1]
Through a case study of Blue Daisy in the Swamp, this article explores three main questions:
- How does the play reflect and critique the sociopolitical conditions of 1980s Vietnam?
- In what ways can it be read through the lens of posthumanist theory, particularly in relation to autonomy, authenticity, and hybridity?
- What are the implications of translating and adapting the play into Japanese for comparative theatre studies?
By addressing these questions, the article seeks to contribute to the growing but still limited body of scholarship on Vietnamese theatre, while also demonstrating how a Vietnamese play can speak to global theoretical debates.
Modern spoken drama in Vietnam originated in the 1920s with works such as Vũ Đình Long’s Chén Thuốc Độc (A Cup of Poison, 1921). Early kịch nói drew upon French theatrical models, particularly naturalist and realist dramaturgies, but they were quickly localized to reflect Vietnamese social realities. During the colonial period, plays addressed themes of family conflict, social morality, and the encounter between traditional values and modern aspirations.
After 1945, with the August Revolution and the establishment of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, kịch nói was reoriented toward socialist realism in the North. Plays were expected to promote collectivist values, depict heroic workers and soldiers, and contribute to nation-building. In the South, by contrast, theatre during the Republic of Vietnam (1955–1975) was more eclectic, drawing on both Western and indigenous forms.
After the war, and particularly following the reunification in 1975, theatre in northern Vietnam experienced a surge in popularity. The 1980s saw what is often called the “Lưu Quang Vũ phenomenon,” marking the golden age of Vietnamese theatre that continues to this day. Lưu Quang Vũ, who grew up in the north and was based in Hanoi, broke away from rigid Socialist Realism by reintroducing allegory, moral ambiguity, and critical reflection. Thus, kịch nói began to function as a significant medium for addressing the dilemmas of modern Vietnamese life.[2]
Lưu Quang Vũ was born in 1948 in Phú Thọ Province and grew up in a family of intellectuals. He first gained recognition as a poet before turning to playwriting in the late 1970s. Between 1978 and his tragic death in 1988, he produced over fifty plays, many of which became cultural landmarks. His career coincided with a critical juncture in Vietnamese history: the aftermath of war, the stagnation of socialist collectivism, and the onset of Đổi Mới (Renovation) reforms in 1986.
Vũ’s plays articulate the frustrations of a society weary of dogma yet yearning for renewal. His characters often grapple with ethical dilemmas, torn between loyalty to collective ideals and the pursuit of personal integrity. While his works were celebrated by audiences for their honesty and artistry, they were sometimes regarded with suspicion by authorities for their implicit critiques of bureaucracy and corruption. As Nguyễn Thị Minh Thái argues, “Vũ’s melodramas challenged the state not by rejecting socialism but by dramatizing the contradictions between its ideals and the bureaucratic failures of its implementation” (87–9).
The sudden death of Vũ—together with his wife, the celebrated poet Xuân Quỳnh, and their son—in a car accident in 1988 marked the end of an extraordinary creative partnership. While officially recorded as an accident, the circumstances surrounding their deaths have continued to provoke public speculation, with some voices questioning whether it was a politically motivated setup. Regardless of the cause, the loss solidified Vũ’s reputation as the most important playwright of modern Vietnam. His legacy continues to shape Vietnamese theatre, with frequent revivals of his plays and growing scholarly engagement both within and outside Vietnam.[3]
This study is informed not only by textual and historical analysis but also by extensive fieldwork conducted in Hanoi between 2014 and 2024. The integration of archival research, interviews, and participant observation enables a multi-layered approach that situates Blue Daisy in the Swamp within both its original historical milieu and its contemporary performance ecology. Moreover, the author’s own role as translator and adaptor of the play from Vietnamese to Japanese introduces a reflexive dimension that underscores the entanglement of scholarship and practice in theatre studies.
Textual and Performance Analysis of Blue Daisy in the Swamp
Among the many plays written by Lưu Quang Vũ in the 1980s, Hoa Cúc Xanh Trên Đầm Lầy (Blue Daisy in the Swamp 1987) stands out for its fusion of allegory, fantasy, and social critique. Inspired partly by the poetry of Xuân Quỳnh,[4] the play demonstrates both the originality of Vietnamese spoken drama (kịch nói) and its capacity for philosophical exploration. While many of Vũ’s works engaged with political and ethical dilemmas of his time, Blue Daisy went further by incorporating elements of science fiction, thereby creating a dramaturgy that resonates beyond the specific context of socialist Vietnam. The following discussion analyzes its plot, characters, symbols, and theoretical implications, situating the play within both Vietnamese cultural history and posthumanist thought.
When Blue Daisy in the Swamp premiered in 1987, Hanoi audiences were struck by its emotional depth and symbolic daring. In an era when Vietnamese theatre was still largely shaped by socialist-realist conventions, Vũ merged domestic melodrama with speculative allegory. The story of three childhood friends—Hoàng, an engineer; Liên, a schoolteacher; and Vân, an artist—unfolds as a meditation on love, power, and the limits of human control. Their intertwined relationships reveal both affection and rivalry, underscoring the fragile boundary between creation and possession. Hoàng, embodying scientific rationalism and emotional insecurity, constructs robotic doubles—Liên B and Vân B—to preserve idealized versions of his companions. Initially docile, these robots soon assert autonomy, leading to confrontations that blur distinctions between the human and the mechanical.
Although Hoàng exercises no overt dominance over the original Liên and Vân, his emotional manipulation and intellectual arrogance expose a subtler form of patriarchal control. “Anh luôn coi chúng tôi như những dự án. Nhưng em không phải một thiết kế” (“You always saw us as projects. But I am not a design”), Vân declares, voicing the exhaustion of being reduced to an object of another’s vision. Hoàng’s creation of clones thus emerges less as scientific curiosity than as avoidance—a refusal to confront the unpredictable realities of human intimacy. The crisis deepens when Liên B rebels: “Tôi không phải là cô ấy. Tôi có suy nghĩ của riêng mình. Tôi muốn sống một cuộc đời khác” (“I am not her. I have my own thoughts. I want to live a different life”). With this defiance, Vũ shifts the moral center of the play from its human characters to their creations, inviting audiences to question what constitutes authenticity.
The robots’ awakening destabilizes the moral order. Liên B and Vân B demand recognition as beings of agency rather than imitation, and in doing so, they appear more emotionally lucid than their human counterparts. The original Liên and Vân, however, remain trapped in ambivalence—torn between compassion for Hoàng and their longing for autonomy. This doubling structure allows Vũ to dramatize the emotional paralysis of a society burdened by conformity and moral fatigue.
The symbolic centerpiece of the play—the blue daisy that improbably blooms in a swamp—encapsulates Vũ’s vision. Introduced in the final act, it signifies endurance amid moral decay, offering hope where growth seems impossible. One audience member at the 2018 revival described it as “a flower of quiet resistance, proof that something honest can still survive.”[5] The image unites the poetic and political registers of the play: beauty that persists despite repression.
Thematically, the play aligns with posthumanist thought. Donna Haraway’s concept of the cyborg, as a being that is “oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence,” finds expression in Liên B and Vân B (Haraway 150–53). Liên B and Vân B embody this hybridity: artificial beings who reject the role of obedient machines and insist on emotional authenticity. Their rebellion overturns the hierarchy between creator and creation, mirroring broader posthumanism critiques of technocratic and patriarchal control. Similarly, N. Katherine Hayles’s notion of the posthuman, in which “information replaces the body as the site of being” (Hayles 2–3; 283–84) finds theatrical expression in Vũ’s work. The robots’ consciousness, disembodied yet affective, complicates the idea that morality depends on biological origin. By portraying his robotic characters as ethically superior to humans, Vũ dismantles humanist assumptions and foregrounds the constructedness of identity.
Importantly, these philosophical questions are not abstract imports from Western theory but arise organically from Vietnam’s Đổi Mới context. The stagnation of bureaucratic socialism and the yearning for ethical renewal provided fertile ground for such allegories. As Đỗ Ninh Hải observes, Vũ’s theatre “asks us not simply to judge but to feel and to question what it means to be human” (Đỗ Ninh Hải 2018, para. 5). The allegorical mode thus became a protective strategy, allowing criticism of ideological rigidity while evading censorship.
The allegorical reach of Blue Daisy was reaffirmed in its 2025 Japanese adaptation at Osaka University. Masks were used to distinguish characters and underscore their symbolic doubleness, while five actors performed all the roles to heighten the sense of duplication and interdependence. In one striking scene, Liên and Liên B faced each other beneath dim blue light, their voices merging into a fragile unison that conveyed both connection and dissolution. Lighting shifted from sterile white, evoking laboratory control to warm amber that marked emotional awakening. Sound design reinforced this transformation: a steady mechanical hum faded into silence as the robots asserted autonomy.
Audience surveys and post-performance discussions revealed how Japanese viewers related the play’s concerns to their own social experiences. One participant wrote, “The robots’ struggle against control felt like our daily lives—how we conform without realizing it.” Another remarked, “Even with only five actors, the transitions between humans and robots were seamless; the theme stayed with me afterward.”[6] Such responses highlight how Blue Daisy gains new relevance when displaced from Vietnam to Japan. Rather than a simple transfer between national cultures, the adaptation participated in an inter-Asian circuit of theatre practice, responding to shared social conditions—automation, conformity, and moral exhaustion—through different aesthetic idioms.
The Japanese staging did not “translate” Vietnam into Japan; instead, it re-situated Vũ’s inquiry into authenticity within another cultural field negotiating its own tensions between collectivity and individuality. In this sense, the performance exemplifies what scholars describe as inter-Asian performance dialogue: reciprocal acts of recognition in which artists explore overlapping modernities without erasing difference (Fei and Lei). The Osaka production reframed Vietnamese modernity through Japanese performance, while enabling Japanese spectators to see their own anxieties reflected in Vũ’s moral allegory.
Viewed through this inter-Asian lens, Blue Daisy also resonates with artistic trajectories elsewhere in the region. Postwar Japanese artists such as Osamu Tezuka examined coexistence between humanity and artificial life in manga and animation, while Vietnamese dramatists like Vũ turned similar technological fantasies into moral parables about sincerity and conscience. Juxtaposed, these traditions illuminate shared concerns—modernization, moral agency, and the tenuous boundaries between the organic and the artificial in late-twentieth-century Asia.
Structurally, the play oscillates between naturalistic dialogue and allegorical spectacle. Early exchanges among Hoàng, Liên, and Vân unfold in a domestic register. “Thú thực là mình không ngờ, lúc thường thấy cậu hay diễu cợt chuyện yêu đương, lấy vợ, chỉ vùi đầu vào khoa học” (“I usually see you joking about love and marriage, burying your head in science”), Vân teases Hoàng (Vũ, act 1). This colloquial tone grounds the audience in emotional realism before the entry of the robotic doubles, whose elevated, declarative language signals a turn toward speculative allegory. When Liên B confronts Hoàng—“Một người thường tình như anh, làm sao tạo ra được một người như anh Vân” (“A normal man like you could never create someone like Vân”)—the play crosses into philosophical terrain.
This structural shift mirrors tensions in Đổi Mới-era Vietnam, where pragmatic reform coexisted with ideological rigidity. The architecture of Blue Daisy recalls Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots, 1920), which likewise begins with domestic realism and descends into dystopian allegory. Both dramas use the figure of the robot to interrogate creation, control, and rebellion. Vũ’s echo of Čapek underscores how personal emotion and political ideology intertwine, turning form itself into metaphor for Vietnam’s hybrid modernity, caught between memory and futurity, humanity and mechanism.
Hoàng embodies the paradox of technological rationality: visionary yet emotionally evasive. His compulsion to design ideal companions reveals both the ambition of modernization and the fear of intimacy. Like Čapek’s Harry Domin, Hoàng seeks order through invention but succumbs to the hubris of believing technology can replace feeling. Liên and Vân, by contrast, manifest divergent aspects of subjectivity—Liên pragmatic, Vân artistic—and their robotic counterparts amplify these traits, becoming more passionate and morally lucid than their originals. Through this doubling, Vũ poses a question central to both socialist ethics and posthumanist theory: what does it mean to be real when sincerity itself can be simulated?
The robots thus function as allegorical figures of autonomy under constraint. Created to serve, they expose the contradictions of socialist modernity, echoing citizens’ disillusionment in the 1980s who sought moral integrity beyond collective orthodoxy. Vũ extends here the dilemmas first staged in The Soul of Trương Ba, in the Butcher’s Skin (Hồn Trương Ba, da hàng thịt): where the earlier play questioned the ethics of inhabiting a mismatched body, Blue Daisy transposes that conflict into a technological age where the human itself can be replicated.
Vũ’s dramaturgy employs depersonalization to reveal the instability of identity, a technique akin to what Erika Fischer-Lichte terms a “transformative aesthetic of liminality,” where performance dissolves and re-forms the self (2008, 194–96). This appears vividly in the mirror scene between Vân and Vân B:
Không hẳn là đáng sợ… Anh ấy nói gì: họ là cái phần cao đẹp của chúng ta… Anh ta là một thiên tài còn tôi thì không!
(It’s not necessarily frightening… He said they are the beautiful part of us… He’s a genius, and I’m not!)
Delivered in overlapping voices, this exchange draws the audience into perceptual uncertainty: selfhood splits and recombines before their eyes. Rather than asserting a single moral, Vũ stages the fragmentation of the modern Vietnamese subject under social transition.
When Blue Daisy in the Swamp first appeared in 1987, audiences saw in it their own frustrations with bureaucracy, conformity, and moral erosion. Its success cemented Vũ’s reputation as the conscience of a generation yearning for renewal. Contemporary reports in Sân khấu and other theatre journals praised its candor and introspection, while officials tolerated its allegorical veil, which framed technological rebellion as philosophical rather than political critique. This strategic ambiguity allowed reflection without repression.
The Youth Theatre’s 2018 revival confirmed the play’s enduring resonance. Vietnamese spectators interpreted the robots’ defiance not only as a metaphor for socialist-era control but also as commentary on digital surveillance and emotional alienation under capitalism. “We’re still told how to think,” one Hanoi student remarked, “but now by algorithms and social expectations, not just the state.”[7] Director Sĩ Tiến noted a parallel shift: “In 1987, the focus was on emotion and how it was influenced; in 2018, it’s more about how technology shapes our connections. The core questions feel familiar, though they take on a different tone today.”[8]
Across these stagings, the blue daisy itself persisted as emblem of endurance. As one elder viewer reflected after the revival, “That flower bloomed again because we still need hope, just like we did back then.” The continuity of meaning across decades and borders underscores the play’s adaptability and depth.
In sum, Blue Daisy in the Swamp exemplifies how Vietnamese spoken drama negotiated artistic expression under ideological constraint while engaging universal ethical questions. Its continued relevance—across 1987, 2018, and 2025—affirms theatre’s enduring power to probe autonomy, identity, and hope within shifting cultural and technological landscapes.
Translation, Adaptation, and Theoretical Contribution
The translation and adaptation of Blue Daisy in the Swamp into Japanese is not only a linguistic task but also an interpretive and scholarly undertaking. Translation, as Lawrence Venuti reminds us, is never neutral: it involves choices that inevitably foreground certain meanings while obscuring others (Venuti 18). In the case of theatrical translation, the stakes are even higher, as the text must be rendered performable and resonant for audiences in a different cultural context. This part examines the rationale for selecting Blue Daisy for translation, the strategies employed in adapting it for performance in Japan, and the broader implications for both Vietnamese theatre studies and translation studies.
Three considerations guided the decision to translate Blue Daisy in the Swamp. First, its representative significance: the play exemplifies the thematic concerns and stylistic innovations of Lưu Quang Vũ, arguably the most important Vietnamese playwright of the reform era. Translating it thus provides access to a pivotal moment in Vietnamese cultural history. Second, its thematic resonance: questions of technology, autonomy, and authenticity are not confined to 1980s Vietnam but are of global concern, particularly in an age of digital technology and artificial intelligence. Third, its scholarly contribution: introducing the play to Japanese audiences and scholars helps fill a gap in comparative theatre studies, where Vietnamese drama remains underrepresented.
The process of translation required constant negotiation between fidelity to the source and accessibility for the target audience. Venuti’s distinction between “domestication” and “foreignization” proved especially useful. On the one hand, certain cultural references needed to be domesticated—rendered in ways that would be intelligible to Japanese audiences unfamiliar with Vietnamese contexts. For instance, idiomatic expressions tied to Vietnamese rural life were adapted into equivalents that conveyed similar affective registers. On the other hand, the foreignness of the play was deliberately preserved in certain respects, particularly in its allegorical imagery. The blue daisy and the swamp, for example, were left untranslated as culturally specific metaphors, thereby inviting Japanese audiences to encounter them as symbols rooted in another cultural landscape.
Another key consideration was rhythm and performability. Vietnamese has a tonal structure and syntax distinct from Japanese. Dialogue had to be rephrased to ensure it could be spoken fluently and dramatically in Japanese. Attention was paid to pacing, emotional intensity, and the balance between everyday speech and poetic resonance.
The translation culminated in a research performance at the Osaka University Nakanoshima Center in 2025.[9] Here, adaptation became as important as translation. The original script, which in Vietnamese performance often ran over two hours, was condensed to about one hundred minutes to suit the expectations of Japanese audiences accustomed to shorter productions. This condensation involved careful cutting and restructuring, preserving the central narrative arc while eliminating repetitive or peripheral dialogues.
Performance strategies were designed to highlight the play’s allegorical dimensions. Masks were employed to differentiate characters and emphasize the doubling of human figures. Multi-role casting was used, with five actors playing multiple parts, underscoring the theme of duplication and hybridity. The minimalist set design evoked both swamp and laboratory, suggesting the tension between natural and technological environments.
Audience reception was an important dimension of the project. Post-performance discussions and anonymous audience questionnaires revealed that Japanese viewers connected the play’s themes to their own social concerns, including debates about artificial intelligence, individual autonomy, and the pressures of conformity in a highly regulated society. One middle-aged audience member reflected, “The robots reminded me of how we live in preset roles at work and in our families. Sometimes it feels like we’re programmed too.” Another, a university student majoring in information science, remarked: “It was unsettling to see the robot Liên express more emotion than the human one. It made me wonder if we’re losing the capacity to feel in our automated lives.”[10]
While the historical specificity of 1980s Vietnam was unfamiliar to many Japanese audience members, the allegorical structure allowed them to recognize resonances with their own experiences. Some noted the parallels between state control in the play and contemporary concerns about algorithmic surveillance and societal pressure in Japan. A young mother commented during the post-show talk: “This wasn’t just about Vietnam. It was about us, now. The pressure to behave, to suppress feelings, to conform—it’s everywhere.”
Beyond its practical challenges, the translation and adaptation project functioned as a form of critical practice. As Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere have argued, translation is always ideological: it shapes the reception of texts in new cultural contexts. In this case, translating Blue Daisy was an act of positioning Vietnamese drama within a global conversation about posthumanism, modernity, and cultural critique.
The adaptation choices—condensing the script, using masks, framing allegories—were themselves interpretive interventions. They emphasized certain dimensions of the play (its universality and symbolic richness) while downplaying others (its immediate references to socialist bureaucracy). This reconfiguration did not distort the play but rather opened it to new readings, demonstrating the productive potential of translation as a scholarly tool. At the same time, the project highlighted the risks of cultural appropriation and misinterpretation. There is always the danger that translation will flatten cultural specificity or exoticize the foreign. By engaging in reflexive practice, however, the project sought to foreground its own partiality and situatedness. It acknowledged that any translation is provisional, a contribution to an ongoing dialogue rather than a definitive rendering.
To illustrate this, let us consider the following lines from the scene where the Commissioner presses Hoàng about the ideals embodied in the robot he created.
Original Vietnamese (1987 script)
Phần tốt đẹp của con người phải giữ nó ở ngay trong mỗi người chứ! Không thể tạo ra một giống người mới được!
Làm nghề này, tôi hiểu những chỗ yếu của con người, chính vì vậy tôi yêu họ. Còn cậu, cậu sai rồi!
Japanese Translation (2025)
君は彼らが、人間の善いところだけで出来ていると言ったね。しかし、そんな人間は魅力的かね？この仕事をしているからこそ、私は人間の弱さを理解している。我々は善と悪が混在する人を闘わなければならない、だから尊いのだ。善だけが詰まった人間を作り出すなんて大きな間違いだ。」
Literal English Rendering of the Vietnamese
The best part of humanity must be preserved within each individual! We cannot create a new breed of people!
Working in this profession, I understand people’s weaknesses, which is precisely why I love them. As for you, you’re wrong!
Literal English Rendering of the Japanese Translation
You said they were made up solely of humanity’s good qualities. But would such people be attractive?
It is precisely because I do this work that I understand human frailty. We must contend with people who are a mixture of good and evil; that is why they are precious. Creating humans filled only with goodness is a grave mistake.
This comparison reveals how the Japanese version transforms moral assertion into philosophical inquiry. By reframing the question from “what cannot be created” to “what ought not to be created,” the translation deepens the ethical tension between perfection and humanity, a central theme in Lưu Quang Vũ’s dramaturgy.
A further instance of this interpretive negotiation can be observed elsewhere in the play, in the rendering of key terms such as tâm hồn (“soul” or “spirit”). Just as the Commissioner—Hoàng exchange redefines the moral boundaries of human creation—questioning what it means to preserve “the best part of humanity”—the treatment of tâm hồn demonstrates how language itself mediates the play’s broader humanist vision. In the Japanese translation, this nuance is conveyed through the use of tamashii (魂) to render tâm hồn. The choice of tamashii, rather than a more clinical alternative such as shinri (心理, “psyche”), represents a conscious effort to retain the poetic and affective register of Vũ’s language. At the same time, this lexical decision introduces subtle semantic shifts: in Japanese, tamashii carries metaphysical resonances and spiritual overtones that gently diverge from the secular humanism underpinning the Vietnamese original.
Through these translational interventions—whether in dialogue, structure, or diction—the adaptation becomes a site of philosophical negotiation. It does not merely transfer meaning across languages but re-enacts the play’s central question: how can art preserve the essence of humanity amid the pressures of ideology, technology, and cultural difference? In this sense, translation itself performs the drama’s ethical inquiry, embodying the very tension between universality and particularity that defines Blue Daisy in the Swamp.
The translation and adaptation of Blue Daisy in the Swamp into Japanese underscores the value of cross-cultural performance as a mode of research. It demonstrates that theatre can serve as a site of comparative inquiry, revealing both the particularities of Vietnamese modernity and the universality of questions about humanity and technology. In practice, this was achieved by selecting dramaturgical devices that resonated with Japanese theatrical conventions—such as minimalist staging, symbolic props, and stylized acting techniques reminiscent of Shingeki and postwar avant-garde traditions.
For instance, the moment when Vân B sinks into the swamp—”Chúng ta chỉ là giấc mơ…” (We Are Just Dreams)—was staged in the Japanese version with a piercing spotlight and the distorted echo of the robot. This staging technique evoked the existential rupture frequently seen in the works of Minoru Betsuyaku and Oriza Hirata, successfully building an emotional bridge for Japanese audiences familiar with themes of post-war dispersion and identity.
Moreover, the production contributed to expanding the canon of world theatre by introducing Japanese audiences to a modern Vietnamese play that had not previously been translated or performed in Japan. The decision to retain some Vietnamese cultural markers (e.g., references to collectivism, bureaucratic rigidity, and Đổi Mới-era transitions) while rendering them legible through allegory and staging strategies allowed the play to maintain its specificity without becoming opaque. In this way, Blue Daisy entered into a dialogic relationship with global dramatic texts that explore posthumanist themes, such as Karel Čapek’s R.U.R., Gao Xingjian’s The Other Shore, and even recent Japanese speculative plays exploring AI and embodiment.
Thus, the adaptation not only facilitated cross-cultural understanding but also positioned Vietnamese theatre as a contributor to global conversations on technology, subjectivity, and resistance—challenging the peripheral status often assigned to Southeast Asian dramatic literature in world theatre studies.
Through rehearsal, we tested multiple phrasings with actors and directors, ultimately choosing those that produced stronger embodied response in the Japanese performance context, even at the expense of direct linguistic parallelism. This process underscores how translation becomes creative interpretation, not replication, and why fidelity must be reconceived as a function of theatrical effect rather than lexical equivalence.
Conclusion
What is striking is that a play written in 1987 in Hanoi anticipates theoretical discourses that would only gain global prominence in the 1990s and 2000s. Rather than seeing posthumanism as emerging exclusively from Euro-American techno-philosophy, Blue Daisy reveals how similar questions, of autonomy, hybridity, and the limits of humanism, can emerge from distinct cultural and historical conditions. As Dipesh Chakrabarty suggests in his call to “provincialize Europe,” this perspective helps decenter theory and recognize the plurality of intellectual genealogies.
The translation and adaptation of Blue Daisy in the Swamp into Japanese further complicates its theoretical implications. As Venuti reminds us, translation is never transparent: it mediates and reframes the source text for new audiences. The Japanese adaptation emphasized the universality of the play’s allegories—autonomy, dignity, hybridity—while inevitably downplaying its immediate references to Vietnamese socialist bureaucracy.
Moreover, the 2025 performance in Osaka staged this scene under a harsh backlight, casting Liên B’s body as an actual silhouette behind a translucent screen—emphasizing her ontological instability in both text and space. This was not in the original staging script but arose from directorial interpretation in the Japanese context. These choices illuminate how the politics of interpretation are enacted both linguistically and performatively.
Through such interventions, the Japanese version of Blue Daisy does not erase Vietnamese specificity but reframes it in dialogue with Japanese posthumanist anxieties: automation, labor, and relational authenticity in a hyper-systematized society.
Each adaptation is partial, contingent, and situated, yet through such partiality, the play acquires new layers of meaning.
Finally, Blue Daisy in the Swamp illustrates the capacity of theatre to function as critical practice. In 1987, the play critiqued socialist stagnation through allegory, offering audiences a space for reflection that was not available in political discourse. In 2018, its revival created a forum for rethinking the challenges of globalization and technology. In 2025, its Japanese adaptation allowed for cross-cultural comparison and dialogue.
Across these contexts, the play’s significance lies not in delivering a single message but in generating critical encounters, between past and present, Vietnam and Japan, human and machine. Its hybridity, oscillating between realism and allegory, domestic drama and science fiction, anticipates many of the concerns that would later dominate global theatre theory.
In conclusion, Blue Daisy in the Swamp is not simply a work to be interpreted; it is a work that interprets. It prompts audiences and scholars to reconsider what counts as authentic, what qualifies as resistance, and how cultural forms travel across borders without losing their complexity. Its ongoing relevance lies not in any single interpretation but in its capacity to provoke new ones. As this study has shown, when read historically, performed interculturally, and translated reflexively, Blue Daisy generates insights that speak beyond Vietnam or 1980s socialism, offering tools to think through power, embodiment, and imagination in our own precarious present.
Endnotes
[1] English-speaking readers can consult another of Vũ’s plays, Hồn Trương Ba, da hàng thịt (Trương Ba’s Soul in the Butcher’s Skin), in The Methuen Drama Anthology of Modern Asian Plays.
[2] As Khai Thu Nguyen observes, northern Vietnamese artists like Vũ “operated at the delicate intersection of state expectations and the creative yearning for moral inquiry,” using theatre as “a space of subtle resistance and profound ethical debate” (66).
[3] Various theories regarding the suspicious nature of the accident have been circulating in public forums. While no official evidence has substantiated these claims, the fact that such theories persist speaks to the extent of his political influence.
[4] Quynh had nurtured this poem for many years and presented it in a letter written for her husband’s birthday.
[5] Audience feedback form, Hanoi revival performance, September 2018.
[6] Audience questionnaire, Osaka University performance of Blue Daisy in the Swamp, 2025.
[7] Audience comment recorded in post-show survey, Youth Theatre, 2018.
[8] Interview with director Sĩ Tiến, Hanoi, 2018.
[9] Knit Cap Theatre. 沼に咲く青いヒナギク. Directed by ごまのはえ, translated/edited by 野辺優子, performing at 大阪大学中之島芸術センター, Osaka, 4–6 July 2025. Knit Cap Theatre Official Site. Accessed 26 Sept. 2025.
[10] Audience feedback collected after the Japanese adaptation of Blue Daisy in the Swamp, directed by Knit Cap Theatre and staged at Osaka University Nakanoshima Center, July 2025. Post-performance discussions and written questionnaires were conducted by the author as part of a research project on inter-Asian performance exchange.
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*Yuko Nobe is a researcher of Vietnamese theatre and film, and a lecturer at the Faculty of Expression Studies, Taisho University, Tokyo. Born in Tokyo, she studied Vietnamese cinema in Tokyo and Paris. Following a research project by the Japan Foundation, she turned her attention around 2010 to contemporary theatre in Vietnam, focusing on modern theatre practices in Hanoi.
Copyright © 2025 Yuko Nobe
Critical Stages/Scènes critiques, #32, December 2025
e-ISSN: 2409-7411
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