Entertainment

Actress with a plan

By Han Bingbin (China Daily)
Updated: 2011-05-31 07:42

Isy Chautemps, a French drama director and actress, who has starred in 11 Chinese TV dramas, follows her theater dream in Beijing. Photos by Zou Hong / China Daily

A French performer found a husband and a charity mission in Beijing. Han Bingbin reports.

As a crucial part of the 2011 Festival Croisements, the staging of the French stage classic, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, clearly shows that the festival wants to achieve more than producing good art. Theatre des Lanternes, a 6-year-old amateur drama group made up of French-speaking expatriates in Beijing, which will perform the Moliere play in early June, has a philanthropic aim. All profits from ticket sales will be donated to help orphans in central China who are too poor to continue their schooling.

However, the course of true love never did run smooth. Isy Chautemps, the play's director, is worried about a potential danger that she dares not tell the actors. Whether the play will go ahead is in doubt. Due to China's censorship process, Chautemps has to submit not only regular documents such as script, passports and a theater contract, but also a video of the full play. When she spoke to METRO, Chautemps said the whole play was not yet in shape.

"We're here to help the government, not to give them trouble, so I'm confident there will be no problem," Chautemps said. "Luckily, we were not given a strict deadline. We're only required to summit the video any time before the show opens."

Despite her optimism, Chautemps cannot help thinking about the worst-case scenario: All the costs on costumes, sets and theater rental will go down the drain. That would mean months of work persuading companies to invest in the well-intentioned play would be wasted.

So she and her colleagues had to speed up rehearsals by sacrificing their family time. Although the desire to help poor orphans is the major driving force behind the production, Chautemps said she is also doing the play for her father who was an orphan.

The aspiration in the eyes of those orphans in remote western China that she has often seen on TV always reminded her of her father, who on Christmas night used to share with her the miseries of a lonely childhood.

"My father's experience took something from my heart and left a hole in it. Helping those orphans is actually a way of filling up the hole in my heart," Chautemps said.

That's why the French actress, who has also performed in 11 Chinese TV dramas, had to refuse several TV roles (and a good income) so she could dedicate herself fully to the charity play. Since Chautemps joined the theater group in early 2009, she has directed three charity plays.

Chautemps said directing these plays gives her a sense of achievement, while the TV dramas, in which she usually plays small roles, were just jobs. But there were two exceptions that earned her more than money: her first Chinese TV show, Jin Shan, in which Chautemps played a spiritually rewarding role as a US woman who saved Chinese labor workers, and a recent screen hit called Ren Jian Qing Yuan, in which she played the girlfriend of Chinese TV star Deng Chao.

The latter has earned her some fame in China. Now in supermarkets and airports, people occasionally stare at her and ask whether she was in the hit drama.

"Of course, I feel very happy," Chautemps said. "But as a foreigner, I know the roles I get in Chinese TV dramas are mostly insignificant. So I do it only as a job. I will always try my best to do it well, but the goal is obviously not to become a star."

But be it TV drama or a spiritually rewarding stage play, Chautemps is happy she has had a long career as an actress. She began to learn acting at a national school in Paris when she was 14 and would normally have become an actress in France. But one dramatic morning in 2004 she woke up thinking that she wanted to learn Chinese. Soon after, Chautemps was standing in the gray surrounds of Beijing Language and Culture University about to start her 18-month Chinese course.

Three days after she arrived in Beijing, Chautemps met a man who claimed he was an agent and asked her whether she would like to be in a TV commercial. Chautemps gave the man her telephone number, but eventually thought he was a fake because he never contacted her, until more than a year later he called to offer her a chance to make her first appearance on Chinese TV in a cosmetics commercial.

The man then became Chautemps' agent and helped her start an acting career in China. But it was not acting that kept her in China, but a love story.

An old friend introduced her to a Chinese man, who lived near her. The old friend wanted this man to keep an eye out for this foreign lady. Although the man was not that keen to take on the potential trouble of watching out for a foreign woman, he eventually found love rather than trouble. Chautemps soon fell in love with him and they were married in 2006.

Once happily married and settled in China, Chautemps decided to take her career a step further. Having already helped 85 children by donating box office takings, she realized it was a pity that most of those children had not seen the theater group perform. So her next plan is to take the group to poor areas and perform for the children there.

"The reasons we call our theater group 'lantern' is that on one hand the lantern is a symbol of China, and on the other lantern means light, and there is hope where there is light," she said.

(China Daily 05/31/2011)