To see light in the darkness. To keep hoping for it.
I first read Terre-Ville in early 2025, shortly after Chinese New Year. Yanan, a friend in the Cultural Section of the French Embassy, sent me a WeChat message recommending a play Maud had only just finished. Before I became its Chinese translator and directed its Chinese-language stage adaptation, I encountered it simply as a reader. That was how I first came to know Maud.
Maud is a mother. The world of this play is one she knows intimately. She knows what she is writing about.
After reading the script, we spoke over WhatsApp. Later, when I was in Paris, Maud took the train from the city where she works to meet me. We sat in the café at the Musée Bourdelle, not far from Montparnasse station, and spent the afternoon talking about how the play had come into being. That evening, I walked her back to the station and watched her hurry to catch the last train home.
As we got to know each other, I became increasingly aware of her warmth and vitality. It was there in her approach to making work, certainly, but also in the way she related to people. More than anything, it seemed to me to be her way of approaching life.
I cannot know exactly what difficulties Maud faced when she first became a mother. But I am sure that raising her daughter while continuing to work, to create and to meet life with optimism and energy has helped shape the artist I met in Paris in autumn 2025.
There are words in her play that stayed with me from the first reading: “stronger, more dignified, prouder.”
From my first reading of the play in February 2025 to the coming January, it will have been almost a year. The memory of that first reading has stayed with me. Over time, though, my understanding of the work has deepened, becoming more layered, more particular and more tangible.
Towards the end of 2025, we decided to stage Maud’s play under the Chinese title 有种妈妈 at the newly refurbished Hui Theatre, where audience seating had been added, as our first production of 2026, ahead of Chinese New Year.
Terre-Ville follows a mother and daughter as they accompany one another and grow together. Yet it is not solely a play about their relationship, nor is it simply a treatment of single motherhood as a social issue. At its heart is the experience of confronting a major challenge for the first time: an obstacle that feels insurmountable, a problem that seems impossible to solve, a moment when life appears to have backed you into a corner. What allows us to carry on when we find ourselves somewhere we have never been before, with no clear way through?
The play does not set out to give its audience an answer. It hopes instead to offer a sense of strength: a quiet but genuine belief that what we live through can make us stronger, more dignified and prouder.
For me, the point is not to dwell on life’s hardships, or the suffering they can sometimes bring, but to draw our attention to other aspects of life that are just as real and too easily overlooked. I have always believed that a compelling work of theatre should reveal life in its multiplicity, and allow us to see more than one side of a person, or of a situation. Only then can we begin to understand, to accept, and perhaps to move closer to love.
Life is like that. Darkness and light, bitterness and sweetness, despair and tenderness are not opposites. They exist alongside one another. It is their entanglement that gives our lives weight and meaning.
Theatre should be able to remind us that, even when things are at their hardest, we can still find a way forward. Beyond the night lies the day. That is what Terre-Ville hopes to do: to stay beside us in the darkness, helping us continue to see the light, and to hope for it.
In January 2026, just before Chinese New Year, as one year gives way to another and we face all that remains unknown, I hope to place that strength gently in the hands of the audience.
Sifan Shao · Beijing, 20 December 2025