May 35th – Southwark Playhouse Elephant
4th June 1989 – This is the date to remember! But, if you live in China or Hong Kong, this date causes their government to have amnesia, and the Chinese government enforces countrywide amnesia on its people. There is no longer a 4th June 1989 in the Chinese calendar, not one that can be discussed anyway. To disguise discussion, this date is now May 35th, and both the date, and the lives of the victims of the Tiananmen Square massacre have been erased from history.
In a country where the government uses dehumanisation as a means of controlling its people, this play attempts to overturn this, by bringing together interviews from some of the victim’s families and allows them to speak in one voice.
The play centres around a student, Ah Dai who was a hard-working b...