Rickshaw Boy Beijing Artists Management Corp Esplanade Theatre Feb 7

Chinese modern writer Lao She’s sweeping novel of misfortunes, which follows a country boy’s move to Beijing in the 1920s and his obstinate ambition of owning a rickshaw, is pared down in director Fang Xu’s minimalist adaptation.

Fang has distilled the play into a character study of the pitiable and unlucky Xiangzi, whose name ironically means “auspicious lad”. The young boy’s single-mindedness and naivete about the value of hard work, thriftiness and do-goodery only weds him to his poverty while others move up by trickery and theft.

Fang’s all-male cast of 15 might appear anything but minimalist. Yet more than half the cast doubles up as other characters, switching elegantly from their bedraggled grey puller uniforms into colourful garbs from Republican era China through graceful one-move costume reveals. The raucous streets of Beiping – the old name for the capital – screeches to life through this lean and modular cast.

As soon as Xiangzi purchases his first rickshaw, he loses it to warlord soldiers who confiscate it. This cycle of brief fortune and attendant misfortune becomes a pattern and the audience soon learns to expect it from the boy’s recursive bildungsroman. When a tigress woman (Zhao Zhen) offers to be his sugar mummy, self-sufficient Xiangzi sticks instead to his rickshaw pipe dream.

This motif of cyclical growth is echoed through the tasteful and spare set design that is dominated by circles – wheels, moon gates and round windows are suggested through light projection. The 15 rickshaws suspended above the set read like the men’s unreachable ambitions or the swords of Damocles, threatening to upend their dream of social mobility.

Throughout young Xiangzi’s quest to rise from a wretched labourer to join the rickshaw-owning capitalist class, an older Xiangzi (acted by Fang) sits in a corner, offering bitter hindsight. This device enhances the psychological characterisation of the naive hustler.

The result is a lively distillation of Lao She’s novel. There is little to yawn at in this ...