Breaking feudal ties

Mao caps off and a long, long life to Theatre Delicatessen for bringing grass-roots land reform to 295 Regent Street in central London, which is in the heart of the Crown Estate.

The audacious troupe have dusted off Fanshen, William Hinton's eyewitness account of upheaval in the remote village of Long Bow in China in the late 1940s and early '50s.

But don't go looking for the revolution in a conventional theatre.

The stage is in a nondescript office block five minutes from Oxford Circus. To get to it, you have to go through a security door and down a strip-lit corridor, ending up in an indoor building site equipped with a few basic props.

The programme informs us, without a hint of irony, that it is "thanks to the generosity of the Property Merchant Group, one of London's leading commercial and mixed use development companies" that this is the venue.

The seating arrangement gives a taste of things to come. The audience is divided into red for rich peasant, yellow for middle peasant and green for poor peasant and all have to sit with their allocated class.

A man heaves a hoe while another hammers away at the anvil. A cockerel crows. Another misty day dawns on the plains of Shanxi province, but change is on its way.

T'ien Ming (Pedro Reichert) leads a small Red Army detachment into the settlement, keen to mobilise the poorest in the community against the nationalist Kuomintang forces and the wealthy landlords who have sided with them.

T'ien and his men strive to "sow the wind," calling on the ragged peasants to "discard superstition and study science," but, initially, it proves hard to spur them on, accustomed as they are to toiling in feudal servitude, meekly accepting their meagre lot.

Surely it is natural and god-ordained that we must toil endlessly on someone else's land and hand them the lion's share of the fruits for the privilege. Surely this is as natural as the dowry system and wife-beating.

But the communists patiently persist, asking the simple but ultimately revolutionary question, who is dependent on whom?

At first, only sturdy peasant woman Hsin-Ai and a few others realise that they can "turn the world upside down" if they stop submitting to the yoke. But, once the idea is planted, it is only a matter of discipline and organisation - and the communists have both in abundance.

Veteran playwright David Hare originally adapted Hinton's book for the stage in 1975, the year before the death of Mao.

Hinton, a staunch Marxist until his own death in 2004, later claimed that that year marked the beginning of a "great reversal."

Under Deng Xiaoping's subsequent "pragmatic" policy shift, the collective farm system which was established after the anti-feudal land reforms was largely broken up.

While China's GDP per capita has grown dramatically since then, social inequality has too.

By portraying the complex dynamics of class struggle in the countryside in a resolutely realistic manner, Fanshen offers a vital insight into the making of the People's Republic of China and delivers a warning of fresh upheavals to come unless the Communist Party manages to narrow China's gaping urban-rural divide.

Plays until August 2. Box office: 07708 740 913 or visit the website at www.theatredelicatessen.co.uk.