Wed, 25th March 2026 - Benny & Oldsy at it again!

Welcome to the new Books Network. This is the Nordic Asia Podcast. Welcome to the Nordic Asia Podcast, a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region. My name is Julie Yuwen Chen, Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Today, we have Marty Lektonen to talk about performance and stage production in China. In recent years, Marty has been involved in a Chinese language stage production of the show Shang Ritemption. I'm not so sure how many of our listeners have watched this movie, but this is a very famous American drama film. But this time, it's about a Chinese language production of this play, which is erected by Zhang Guo Li. This is the first play presented in Chinese language by an entirely foreign cast. Marty, being on Finnish national, has been in this interesting Chinese production. I'm really honored to have Marty with us today. He has a rich educational and professional background, and he has lived in China for many years. Importantly, he is a Finnish. So, to begin with, Marty, welcome. Could you introduce yourself to our listeners? Thank you, Julie. Thanks for having me. Great honor to be on such an interesting and interesting stage. I was born and raised in the northern part of Finland. I studied engineering, actually technical physics at the Helsinki University of Technology, now the Altar University. I also studied music at the Helsinki Conservatory. I first went to China in 1982, really, just to see what China was like. China was not the place that a lot of people would go at that time, but I felt that there was something there that I should find out what it is. The way to go to China on an individual basis at that time was to go and study the language. So, I went to a summer language course at the Beijing Language Institute. We were here, you know. And never really looked back. I fell in love with the country, with the people, with the language in particular. And I finished my engineering degree in 1986, and received a Finnish government scholarship to study at the Beijing University. A couple of years later, I met this wonderful Brazilian fellow student girl who had grown up in China during cultural revolution. I spoke Chinese as her first language. We've been together since 38 years now. And as Chinese is her first language, we've always spoken Chinese to each other. So, you know, we raised our children, three children in China. I lived there for 34 years, my wife, 45 years. We relocated to Finland 10 years ago at the request of my then company, which was GE Healthcare. I worked in multiple industrial roles in China, never really in acting at that time. But that's pretty much myself in a nutshell. With your description, I haven't heard anything about your stage performance, but you were involved in this Chinese production of the Shoshang Redemption. So, I guess you have another life. Could you tell us a bit about your another life, as well as this Chinese production? For the benefit of our listeners, let me talk a little bit about what this, what the story is all about, what Shoshang Redemption is. It's originally, it was a novella written by Stephen King in 1982, which was turned into a movie in 1994, starred by Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins. Although, he got ten Oscar nominations for his best film, Best Actor, he didn't receive any award because the same year, for his gum, came out. And other films too, Lion King, and even, you know, this wonderful Taiwanese film, Yenshinan Yu, Eat Drink, Man Woman, came out. It really didn't get the attention that it later on did. 1995, a year later, it really took off in the rental market in the US and then globally. And today, it's the highest rated film on IMDB, 9.3 out of 10, even in China, 9.7 on Do Ban, even though the film has never been released in China. It's been shown twice, the Shanghai International Film Festival, which was in 5 and 18, I believe it was. But it did spread like lots of films at that time, through illegal, DCD and DVD copies. So every Chinese person knows the story. Much more so than in some countries, for instance Finland, the film is barely known. The US is very popular, but Finland, very few people know the film. But in China, everybody does. Why is it so popular? The central theme is hope and freedom and maybe perseverance, you know, endurance under strict authority. But also friendship and loyalty. There's a very, very strong bond between two of the main characters, especially, which could be this Confucian notion of "E" that resonates with a Chinese audience. But at the same time, it's politically quite sensitive. You know, you got wrongfully imprisoned main character, you know, innocent, but sentenced to two life sentences. There is institutional corruption, extremely corrupt warden and guards in the prison. There's brutality, there's violence, there's homosexuality, and there's an escape from confinement. So all these things could be potentially a little bit sensitive. And in fact, many of your listeners would probably remember the escape of Chen Guangcheng, the blind lawyer in Northeast China, in 2012, from House arrest. And then, you know, later on he went to the US. As a result, searches for online searches for Shawshank were banned for a long time because it was said to be the real Shawshank story in China. So that was the movie. But then the stage adaptation was produced or was written by two gentlemen Owen O'Neal and David Gave Jones. He was first shown in Dublin in 2009 and then really took West End in London by Stoke by Storm. And because the story is so popular in China, our production company, Longma Studio, based out of Chen Zhen Ping Chen, acquired the worldwide rights for the Chinese version. He was translated into Chinese and they asked Zhang Guo Li to direct the play. Zhang Guo Li is extremely famous, anyone in China, the Chinese speaking world knows who he is, is a very famous actor and director and also a movie director these days. So the movie and stage actor has been for good to, I don't know, 50 plus years, extremely well known. So he said he's interested, but on one condition, and the condition is that all actors have to be foreigners. Good question. The official, I mean, what he says himself is that, you know, he doesn't like the way Chinese actors portray foreigners because they come across as stereotypical and slightly fake in his mind. He himself has performed multiple roles. His first role was in Mr Lee and so he has performed foreign roles as well, but he said he doesn't like it. So he wanted them to be foreign, all the actors to be foreigners. But on the other hand, given that in the in the play, politically sensitive topics, maybe it is easier to get the play through censorship. If the actors are foreigners, after all, the move that the play tells about the 1950s American prison performed by foreigners, nothing to do with China, right? Except that, of course, many of the themes do have a lot to do with China. I don't know what the real reason was, but that's what he said, and it's easier said than done. And we were, are you going to go for foreign actors that are capable actually of performing well in Chinese? And that was the real challenge. So how did he make it? He first contacted the main character, the narrator of the whole play and found a Canadian fellow student of ours actually from Pei Da. Da Shan, his real name is Mark Roswell, he's extremely well known in China, mainly for crosstalk, Xiang Sheng and some sort of skits and so forth. Not really so much for movies or plays, but extremely well known and speaks extremely good Chinese. He devoted his entire life in fact to all sorts of station formancies in Chinese and has been trained by pretty much all the masters of the Xiang Sheng genre, especially in China. He was contacted first and then they looked for other actors and that was not an easy task. In fact, one of the main characters, the prison warden, really corrupt prison warden, is played by a gentleman called Andy Friend, who is a very well known movie actor. He's played multiple Jiang Wen's movies and lots of other productions in China. He's a childhood friend of my wife's. So after before your break, thanks to COVID that we couldn't go to China, we were there in September 23 and having dinner with him, he said that he's now in this amazing production, short-shank redemption and first stage role and all that. And then a couple of days later he sends a voice message saying, "You know what, our play is still short of one actor and I'm thinking that Matty could play that role." And I said, "You know, nonsense, I'm not going to. I've done Xiang Sheng, I've done skits and all that but I've never been in a play, I'm not going to go." And then my wife said to me, "You know, it's Zhang Guo Li and if you now say no, it's a no forever." If you say yes, who knows what happens. So I said, "Okay, I'll try and make a too many video for him and he called me and said, "You know, you're on." So I was selected for the role of the librarian, a very dramatic and tragic writer. role, in fact, the symbol of institutionalization in the whole play. I'm the saddest. Mine is the saddest role in the whole play. There is otherwise full of hope, but there's no hope for me because I'm, I'm, I'm totally institutionalized. I think in the story, the librarian committee suosa in the end. Right. Yeah. So it's, it's a sad role that you have taken on. Yeah, it's that role. Yes, because I have nothing outside, you know, my whole life is here. I'm, I'm universe, I'm a university graduate. I have a position here under librarian. I'm the civilized person. And they respect me here and outside because I killed my wife and my, my daughter, you know, 42 years ago, I have nothing there. I don't want to leave and get they forced me out. And as a result, I do commit suicide. Hmm. Wow. So you took on this role and then the protection officially open in January 2024, right? And there are so many questions I could ask. I first of all, is that where do you perform there? But then perhaps also the reactions from the Chinese audience, you know, of this foreign narrative that they are familiar with, but now it's played by a bunch of foreigners. I have so many questions. How can you answer those? Well, first of all, you know, many of us were not professional actors. Actually, in fact, most of us were not. We had a few recent graduates from, for instance, the China film Academy and so forth. But I think with the exception of one person out of 11, no one had performed in a play like this before. And it's a very big production. It's not a tiny studio. The theaters are very large. They are, I think the biggest was like 2,200 seats. So it's designed for a very big stage. The set is beautifully done. No expensive spirit. We carry, I think, 120 light fixtures from one theater to the other because none of us just can match the requirements of the lighting, designer and so forth. So it's a big production. And the hence, you know, the rehearsal period was really intense. We rehearsed for 45 days, which felt longer than it sounds because the days were very long. At least 10 hours, sometimes 14 hours a day. And very direct feedback from the director. I mean, he's old school, you know, he used to say to us that, you guys are lucky because my director, my teacher used to beat us with a stick. And he didn't beat us, but verbally he was very direct. But very constructive and always trying to find a way to make it work. But he had to replace. I think we, we, the main role, or the, maybe the number two role, we had three different actors that, you know, were, were replaced because it just didn't work out. The language was not good enough or whatever reasons. Tough rehearsals. And then we started performing as you said January 24, first in Shenzhen. Because this is our production company, Longma Studio, is based out of Shenzhen Pinshant. So that, that was our first sort of dress rehearsal with an audience. And then Shenzhen, Nanshant, the main, main theater, Shenzhen, we had quite a few performances. They moved into Shanghai and finally to Beijing. And then that same year, we performed in Suzhou, Chongqing, Chengdu, Nianting, Hangzhou and so forth. And last year also, they used like Zhengzhou, Tianjin, Wuhan, and so forth. We've had 33 performances and more than 50,000 people have seen the play. The reaction has been by and large very positive. So again, on some of the social media platforms, you know, one gives us 8.7, the other one 9.2 rating, which is very high out of 10, really high. But it's interesting because people love the movie and then they say, "But this was different." Where was the bird? I mean, the library is supposed to have this bird in his pocket. Overall, theater is a fairly new art form in China. It's been around for the past 100 years. Although there's a very strong dramatic tradition in China, the Western type of theater is not very well known. In fact, a lot of my former colleagues and business associates came to see the play and, you know, all very well off in the '40s, '50s, '60s, and most of them had never seen a play in their life. So this was the first time they were in a theater. So people are not used to the art form, which is theater. And naturally, they would compare it to the movie, which is a different art form. So that caused some comments saying that, you know, they didn't appreciate the difference. Or this should have been, this part should have been, you know, like it is in the movie. Now, this language issue, we have some mixed race Chinese, European actors, who grew up in China, and like Andy Friend, the childhood friend of my wife, I mentioned he was born in China, grew up in China, speaks Chinese like a Chinese person dies. But then, then, like myself, I started learning Chinese when I was 21 years old. Obviously, I do have an accent. My Chinese, you could say, is fluent, but being fluent was not nearly enough. And hence, I had a lot of attention from the director, the assistant director, our lines coach, and so forth, to make sure that the pronunciation is flawless, because otherwise, he gets a little bit annoying for the audience. And some audience members made some comments about, you know, such and such actors, you know, accent being a little bit too strong and all that. But overall, they really liked it, because they liked the story so much, and the production is beautiful, and because they love Zhang Guoli. Overall, extremely positive reaction. So I understand he received a lot of media coverage in China, and internationally, the New York Times and the economies, for instance, even have covered the display. Like, it was on the front page feature of the international edition of the New York Times. Am I right? Correct. Come back to something you say earlier on, because he said, in fact, the movie was spain in China. But then, how is it possible that you can actually do a stage performance on the same content? Obviously, I was not very much involved in the approval process, but I did in the entire cubes of some changes I've made. For instance, direct reference to homosexuality was removed. Instead, we called it just violence. But again, when you watch the play, there is no ambiguity about what it is all about. In the words, we had to be maybe a little bit careful about what to say proactively, call itself censorship, if you like. But the gestures on stage are fairly explicit. Actors and producers with long experience in the Chinese base would know what can be said and how it can be said. So, certain things were proactively removed or modified from the script. The script, obviously, would be approved by the owners of the copyright. So, they had to be translated back into English and so forth. So, there was a bit of a check and balance there. But to get it through censorship is complicated. For the stage production, you need to get an approval for every single stage, every single city that you perform, from that city's authorities. Getting that really varies on the city. A change in was not a problem. Shanghai seemed to be fairly straightforward. But to get the initial approval to perform in Beijing took a very long time. To the extent that the production company was concerned, whether we could even play there, because you need a certain time to sell tickets before you perform, otherwise you will be performing to an empty audience. You can always start selling tickets once you have the approval. And then, later on, I believe it was in Chengdu that the authorities would not approve the play at all. And the director had to personally actually call them and say, "Come on, you know, we perform this in Beijing, Shanghai, all these places. Why won't you let us perform it in Chengdu?" And then we got to go ahead to do it. Also, because it's a live performance, live performance is again different from a movie, because things can change during the performance and hence, in every performance, there is a sensor in the audience who could stand up anytime and say, "Okay, stop." And that's the end of your play, at least in that place, or maybe China-wide. So it's a sensitive thing. We were not directly instructed on what to say, but I think it was very clear in the contract that anything that we would do that might jeopardize the production, there will be hefty penalties to pay. So we all behave very well. Despite all the challenges, I think you do have initial success with also coverage in China internationally. So are you going to continue to play this in China in the future? Yes, so we've had 33 performances so far, and all the actors would like to continue. The production company obviously wants to, if it is a good commercial opportunity, wants to continue. The problem, though, is that the Chinese economy is not doing particularly well. The local governments have spent billions building beautiful theaters by all these renowned international architects and so forth. They have just beautiful, beautiful theaters, but they have not really invested much in managing those theaters for instance, promoting plays or sending tickets and so forth. So now that the property market uses in a slump, local governments have much less money, they don't subsidize theaters that way. they used to. This is a theoretical truth now actually have to be accountable for their own financial performance and that's why they are very risk averse and there is in general less place being staged. And also because of the economic situation and uncertainties, consumers are not necessarily willing to spend on things that are not strictly necessary such as theatre performances and art form that they are not familiar with. And our tickets are not cheap, you know the most expensive tickets would be easily 250 euros. The cheapest when you're really up up in the top layer in the back row would be cheaper but if you want good seats you're talking about 150 to 200 euros which is which is a lot of money. There's been discussion about this years tourney and even performing at the National Theatre in Beijing right next to the Great Hall of the People and Shanghai again. Those big cities are feasible financially, smaller cities are really challenging now. So I don't know exactly what the plan is but I do hope that we can continue performing because again you know it's great it's great fun and because the reception has been so warm. Yeah it sounds so fascinating unfortunately we cannot have the play here in the Nordic country because the language is in Chinese otherwise I think it will be so great. Thank you Mati you know for sharing your fascinating experience being involved in a show Shang redemption the Chinese language version in China with us. You're listening to the Nordic Asia podcast with me Julie Yu Wen Chen and Mati Le Tong and other University of Helsinki. You have been listening to the Nordic Asia podcast.