2026 TIPRF- The Double Theatre: A Crazy Play

Synopsis

The story begins with Doyeon, a struggling writer, and his wife Jangmi, who works at a bar—only for the audience to discover they are characters in a rehearsal directed by a frustrated theatre director. The boundary between fiction and reality shatters when Haksu, a ruthless loan shark, storms into the rehearsal room to collect a debt. In an absurd twist, Ha-su offers to trade the debt for investment rights, demanding to be written into the play and attempting to rewrite the ending. As the rehearsal progresses, the characters' real-life emotional entanglements bleed into the fictional play, creating a labyrinthine narrative where the truth becomes indistinguishable from the performance.

In A Crazy Play, playwright Choi Chieon uses a surreal lens to capture the fractured state of modern individuals crushed by financial and existential pressures. Through sophisticated meta-theatrical techniques, he challenges the audience's perception of "reality" while exploring the very nature of creative outputs. This play was awarded the Daesan Literary Award for Playwriting in 2011.
 

Choi Chieon, Playwright

Choi Chieon is a South Korean playwright born in Jeollanam-do in 1970. A graduate of the Department of Creative Writing at Seoul National University of Science and Technology, he began his literary career by winning the Dong-A Ilbo Spring Literary Contest in 1999 for poetry and the Segye Ilbo Spring Literary Contest in 2001 for fiction. He debuted as a playwright in 2003 after winning the 13th Woojin Creative Award for Drama. His distinguished career includes winning the Daesan Literary Award for Playwriting in 2011, and the Grand Prize at the Korea Theatre Awards in both 2014 and 2020. His major works include A Crazy Play, The Feeling of Walking Over the Youngdong Bridge Alone on a Rainy Night, Insufficiently Mourned Sadness, and The Sisters.

The Double Theatre

Founded in 2014, The Double Theatre takes its name from The Theatre and Its Double by Antonin Artaud. The term “公場” is derived from this work, while “Public Theatre” is a homophonic play on the word “factory,” also referring to the concept of public space. The company aspires to use theatre as a form to reflect human relationships within a globalized context. By traversing different modes of thinking, it seeks to make theatre a reflection of life, allowing audiences to view the familiar from new and diverse perspectives.

The company’s works have been presented at arts festivals and theatres across Taiwan. It has also collaborated with institutions including the Goethe-Institut, with projects and performances spanning South Korea, Vietnam, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Its representative work The Way Back was nominated for the Taishin Arts Award and toured at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe (Taiwan Season), ASSITEJ Bright Generations in Marseille, and the Schöne Aussicht Festival in Stuttgart. How I Learned to Dance was performed at Guling Street Avant-Garde Theatre and received an annual excellence award. The Voice, a bilingual work in sign language and spoken language.

About the 2026 Taiwan International Play Reading Festival

The Taiwan International Play Reading Festival (TIPRF) is curated by the Prologue Center for New Plays and jointly organized with the Taipei Performing Arts Center, aiming to establish an international excahnge platform centered on playwrights and plays. Each year, the festival focuses on a specific country or cultural region, exploring the differences and resonances among theatrical traditions and textual aesthetics through staged readings and cross-cultural interpretation.

Here, plays are not only the starting point of theatrical creation, but also a medium for cultural exchange through which diverse social experiences and creative perspectives are reflected, opening up a space for cross-cultural dialogue.

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