You might box [Fanshen] up as a documentary [of the Chinese agrarian reform movement], or as a didactic piece on the lines of Brecht's The Measures Taken: but, in this case, formal classification is no more helpful than using a learned medical term to explain away a virus…. Literally fanshen means "to turn the body": in the revolutionary vocabulary this means putting an end to feudalism—not only by expropriation of property, but by education, judicial reform, sexual equality, the whole process which Chekhov described as "casting out the slave in oneself".

There are two stock varieties of revolutionary drama: those that salute the glorious overthrow of the oppressors, and those that show the new regime going on to exceed the iniquities of the old. The point about Fanshen is that it bypasses this futile cycle, and shows a community that does not collapse into cynicism and corruption. All the violence comes at the start, with the village revolt against the landlords; then a Maoist work team move in and dissolve the local cadres. There are classification meetings, where property is reallocated; public tribunals, where officials come before peasant delegates to confess their mistakes. Everything is open to examination, except the case of remaking the community.

The production encourages you to look at the evidence with an equally open mind. It would take a determined bourgeois individualist to snigger at the characters as card-carrying boy scouts, chorusing the Internationale, and dropping lines like "I fanshened myself and forgot my poor brothers". All that is there; but it appears in a context that gradually forges a human link with an alien society and vindicates the new leaders as honest men….

Through the evening you get to know the rules. They may seem cold-blooded, or pious, or humourless: but by the end they make good sense. Nobody is watertight: nobody needs to despair: "Too many taxes under the Nationalists; too many meetings under the Communists", grumbles one of the peasants. It doesn't seem a bad exchange. Fanshen may not be much of a guide to modern China, but it tells us a good deal about ourselves.