Yifan Wu’s feminist theatre translations reach Chinese stages

By AI, Created 1:50 PM UTC, May 20, 2026, /AGP/ – Yifan Wu’s translations of Lucy Kirkwood’s The Welkin and Aristophanes’ Lysistrata are helping push feminist theatre into the Chinese mainstream, with sold-out runs, touring audiences and a notable response online. The projects also show how translation choices shape what survives when a play moves between languages, cultures and performance settings.

Why it matters: - Feminist stories are gaining more visibility on mainstream stages in China, and translation is a major part of how those works land with audiences. - Yifan Wu’s work shows that theatrical translation is not just linguistic conversion. It also shapes timing, tone, humor and audience reach. - The response to these productions suggests Chinese theatregoers are engaging with imported texts beyond a narrow art-house audience.

What happened: - Yifan Wu translated two productions staged in the 2026 season at the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre: Lucy Kirkwood’s The Welkin and Aristophanes’ Lysistrata. - The Welkin first reached audiences in 2025, sold out, returned for a second run and completed a national tour in May 2026. - The Welkin earned an 8.0 rating on Douban and drew sustained discussion on Xiaohongshu. - Lysistrata was a modernized adaptation commissioned through the Hong Kong Arts Festival and directed by Katerina Evangelatos. - The 2026 Lysistrata production was the first professional mainland staging of that version.

The details: - The Welkin centers on a jury of rural women and uses blunt, idiomatic and often coarse speech. - Wu’s translation had to preserve the play’s shifts between ordinary language and moments of sharp clarity. - Audience posts that quoted lines from the production suggest the translation resonated beyond the theatre. - Lysistrata posed a different problem because Aristophanes’ comedy depends heavily on timing and implication. - Wu built the Lysistrata text to work as a performance script for a specific room, stage and audience. - Wu’s work has been shaped by education and practice across China and the UK. - Wu entered translation through fansubbing and subtitle work for film and television, before moving into more professional theatre work. - Living in the UK added another layer to Wu’s sense of what translation is for. - Wu’s own plays, including Choking Game, have been staged at Bloomsbury Festival and Omnibus Theatre in London. - Wu co-founded Wordtide Theatre, a UK-based theatre company. - Wu is editor of the criticism section of Showtalk, a bilingual platform linking UK-China performing arts through criticism, industry conversations and cultural events.

Between the lines: - The Welkin’s strong reception across Douban and Xiaohongshu points to a production that connected with different kinds of theatre audiences. - Wu’s approach treats translation as collaboration with the source text, the director, the rehearsal room and the audience. - The contrast between the two productions highlights how the same translator can be asked to solve very different stage problems. - The article frames Wu’s work as part of a wider effort to build durable links between UK and Chinese theatre scenes.

What’s next: - Wu’s current body of work suggests more cross-cultural theatre projects are likely to emerge through the same mix of translation, adaptation and criticism. - The season’s two productions leave a broader question open for Chinese theatre: who gets to share the room, and how can that audience be widened.

The bottom line: - Wu’s translations show that the real job is not simply moving words across languages. It is making plays survive, and resonate, on a new stage.