Yu Rongjun (pictured) is eager to examine the way expats play Chinese characters in Shanghai Repertory’s performance of his play, Drift.

He says that at the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Center, “We always have Chinese people acting as foreign people. It’s no big deal. But because of this play’s themes – about culture, home, people’s trips and movements everywhere – when the foreign actors act as Chinese people onstage, I think something will come out.”

Yu won’t be pinned down on what that something might be, but he hints that expats in China have more vested in the migration experience and what it means to be ‘Chinese’ than we tend to let on. “When you’re here, you never think you are Chinese. But you have a lot of Chinese things in your life, in your habits, even your food and your culture,” he says.

Yu finds room for expats on the ‘Chineseness’ continuum, just as Singaporean Chinese characters in Drift do when, having never been to China, they nonetheless refer to it as ‘home’.

Drift takes place in China and Singapore over four generations: the 1920s, when civil war prompted many Chinese to leave for South East Asia; the 1940s, when the Japanese occupied China; the 1970s, during the Cultural Revolution; and today. The thing that unites the play’s characters across time and space, Yu says, is that “they all try to find themselves in their hearts. They want to rebuild themselves.”

Drift itself is being substantially rebuilt from the original performance, which was given in Singapore in 2007. The play was first written in Chinese and English by Yu and Singaporean writer-director Koh Heng Leun. Shanghai Repertory will perform the play entirely in English, and that’s not the only change director Jonathan Geenen is making.

“For me, the work begins with the writing but very quickly things start to expand and take on a life of their own,” he says. “I am trying as I always do to mediate between the two great artists of the theatre (writer and actor) and with the actors we are coming up with some very interesting and challenging stuff. Yu has been a complete joy to question and has been incredibly generous of spirit to allow me to use new ideas while remaining true to the script.”

Yu pretty much has to give Geenen that freedom given the liberties he is taking in an adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, which will be performed at the Dramatic Arts Center next year. In his version, a chef falls in love with a fish.

RMB 180 (Friday and Saturday, RMB 200). 7.30pm, 7-12 September. Shanghai Dramatic Arts Center, 288 Anfu Lu, near Wukang Lu. Web: www.ticket2010.com (tickets)