‘I was afraid somebody might run on stage and harm us’: the Taiwanese play that dares to address nationhood

For most performers, the biggest fear about staging a new play is that no one will come. Or that an actor might forget her lines. For Chiayo Kuo, an activist, artist and diplomat, her biggest fear was that someone might shoot the cast.
“​​During rehearsals, I was so stressed out that I often dreamt that someone would get up from the audience and fire a gun while we were on the stage,” says Kuo.
Considering the subject-matter of her play, Kuo’s nightmares do not seem so far-fetched. Written by Swiss and Taiwanese creators and produced in Switzerland, This Is Not An Embassy deals with Taiwan’s lack of global recognition as a country and the diplomatic challenges it faces as a result.
China, Taiwan’s bigger and more powerful neighbour, claims Taiwan as part of its territory. In service of its aim to influence or coerce the small democracy, the Chinese government has engaged in civil and military campaigns against Taiwan, and well-organised public and private intimidation of dissidents.
“The play will tour around the world, and if any Chinese delegates are not happy to see it, I hope that all the aggression will only be directed towards me, and will not be extended to my family,” says Kuo.
The play imagines three different Taiwanese characters: a retired ambassador, an international organisation worker and a musician from a boba tea merchant family. They debate Taiwan’s withdrawal from the UN in 1971, the controversy over the dictator and military commander Chiang Kai-shek, and the mixed feelings about Taiwan’s official name “Republic of China (ROC)”, and “Chinese Taipei”, a name that Taiwan must use to compete in the Olympics. (In Paris this year, Taiwanese athletes were prohibited from participating under the name “Republic of China (Taiwan), and the Taiwanese flag was banned.) Signs reading “Agree” or “Disagree” are held up during the play to show the difference in Taiwanese opinions.
A sell-out when it was staged in Taipei, This Is Not An Embassy will tour again through Europe from August, despite attempts by the Chinese government to shut it down.
After being performed in Taiwan, the play was praised for representing different voices in Taiwan and showing diverse opinions towards China, the country where many – but not all – Taiwanese people originate, but which is intensifying threats to upend Taiwanese people’s way of life.
China brooks no such nuance. In June, Beijing threatened to impose the death penalty for those it considered to be “diehard” Taiwan independence separatists. In response, Taiwan’s president Lai Ching-te said China has no power to sanction the people of Taiwan. “Democracy is not a crime, autocracy is a sin,” he said.
It is not surprising, then, that This Is Not an Embassy has also been targeted by pro-China forces. The production team told the Guardian that ahead of the last tour, Chinese authorities had called the Swiss foreign ministry and other municipal officials to express concern about the play being staged in the host theatre, in Vidy-Lausanne.
According to the director, the Swiss foreign ministry assured the production team that “we have freedom of artistic expression in this country. Nobody is in charge of censorship here.” The Swiss foreign ministry did not respond to requests for comment.
Theatre’s relatively low profile and a basic commitment to liberal values in the theatre world may have helped their cause, the creators suggest. “I think we have been granted a certain kind of exemption [from China’s pressure],” says Mu Chin, the co-producer.
However some theatres and art festivals in Singapore, Japan and New Zealand have refused to stage This Is Not An Embassy because, Kuo says, “they feel too much pressure.”
At the end of 2023, a presentation in a museum at a festival in Munich was cancelled, without a clear explanation.
Stefan Kaegi, the play’s Swiss-German director, recalls events in Munich: “They cancelled it a few weeks before. We don’t even know what exactly happened but you get paranoid. I guess somebody called. They never called us though. At the beginning, I was afraid that somebody might run on stage and harm us. We thought they would probably do something to interrupt one of the shows. But none of this happened.”
Kaegi has a decade-long relationship with Taiwan. The idea for the play came after he noticed that Switzerland did not have an embassy in Taipei. He wanted to find out what the “de facto embassy” in Taiwan was all about and was curious about Taiwan’s international status.
The play’s first run in Europe took place this year. The morning of the first open rehearsal in the Lausanne theatre, Nauru cut its diplomatic ties with Taiwan and established diplomatic relations with China, just days after Taiwan elected the pro-sovereignty president Lai, who is detested by Beijing. The news was familiar to the Taiwanese people. Since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, almost every country in the world has formed diplomatic ties with it instead of the ROC, ruled by the Chinese Communist party in Beijing. Today, Taiwan has only 12 diplomatic allies left.
The country has enjoyed de facto independence since the defeated Kuomintang fled there at the end of its civil war with the Communist party. But China claims sovereignty over Taiwan and has never ruled out using force to bring it into the fold.
Kaegi says that living in Europe, it’s easy to take basic freedoms for granted. “We are used to criticising a lot of problems of democracy,” he says. “When you come from Shanghai to Taipei, you really feel all over the city that the creativity comes out of a society that has conflict within itself and openly talks and deals with the conflict, and allows others to criticise,” he says.
But despite Taiwanese people’s rowdy and proud celebrations of democracy, the constant pressure from China, including military exercises, still causes anxiety. “China has left Taiwan with a high degree of uncertainty about the future. There is a feeling that the future is not 100% in our hands,” says Kuo.
In the final show in Taipei in April, the audience clapped and cheered as the crew placed a gleaming gold plaque on the stage with the name of the Embassy of the Republic of China (Taiwan) on it. People all over the world take their embassies for granted. Here, for two hours in a theatre in Taipei, Taiwanese people had their diplomatic aspirations fulfilled as well.